How This Works
It's Monday, and the museum is closed.
That's not a hypothetical. It's the single most common way a beautifully generated travel plan falls apart — the museum on your itinerary switched to a Monday closure eight months ago, and nothing forced whatever built your plan to check.
An AI can write you a gorgeous, detailed day in seconds. Whether that day actually works once you're standing in front of the building is a different question entirely — one most travel content, generated or not, never really answers.
MEVAYA exists because of exactly that gap. Before a stop is ever recommended, it's checked against a real source — 377 sights and 2,376 restaurants across our ten cities, each opening-hours claim checked against an official source where one exists, and at least one independent source when it doesn't. Where two sources disagreed, we dug further rather than picking one — more than once, the disagreement itself turned out to be the real story.
The bug that changed how we work
Barcelona's Tibidabo amusement park was the reason we stopped trusting a single source. Early on, our own data marked it open every day of the week. It isn't — from September through June it only opens weekends and scattered public holidays, and a Tuesday visit finds locked gates. That one wrong line didn't just get fixed; it changed the process. We went back and cross-checked every attraction in every city for the same failure mode, rather than assuming one correction was enough.
Why the small stuff matters
Munich's Olympiaturm has been closed since June 2024 for structural work, with the most recent estimate pointing to early 2027 — our first draft had it open, hours and all. Rome's Castel Sant'Angelo is genuinely closed on Mondays; our data initially said it wasn't. Istanbul's Archaeology Museums are, contrary to several existing guides, open every single day — we'd first marked them closed on Mondays, which would have turned visitors away from a museum that was actually welcoming them. None of these are exotic edge cases. They're exactly the kind of specific, checkable fact that separates a route someone can actually follow from one that only looks plausible until they're standing in front of a locked door.
What we still don't know
We're not pretending this is finished. Verification coverage varies by city — restaurant hours near our Berlin routes sit around 98% confirmed, Istanbul closer to 10%, simply because the underlying map data is far more complete in one city than the other. Where we don't have a confirmed answer, the planner says so — it doesn't fill the gap with something that sounds plausible. We'd rather tell you we don't know than tell you something wrong.
Questions
How often is this data re-checked?
There's no fixed universal schedule — we prioritise by how consequential an error would be and how likely a fact is to have changed. A seasonal opening pattern or a stated renovation end-date gets rechecked before that date arrives; a centuries-old cathedral's basic hours get rechecked far less often than a restaurant's.
What happens when MEVAYA can't confirm something?
We say so, in the product itself, rather than defaulting to a plausible-sounding guess. For restaurants specifically, if we can't confirm a venue's hours cover the meal window you need, our planner won't recommend it for that slot — even if it's a five-minute walk away and highly rated.
Isn't this what every travel site already claims?
Most don't check at all — a plan can look complete and still be built entirely from summaries of summaries. The difference here isn't the claim, it's that every stop traces back to a source we can actually name, and where we can't confirm something, we say so instead of filling the gap.
Isn't this just ChatGPT with a nicer UI?
An AI will happily tell you the museum is open on Monday. It isn't lying — it just never checked. We did, against the museum's own site, and we check again every 30 to 120 days. The difference isn't the promise, it's that every claim traces back to a source we can actually name.
See it for yourself
Pick a city and a date. The route you get back is built from exactly the checking described above, not a generic list.