How This Works
It's Monday, and the museum is closed.
That's not a hypothetical. Museums do change their closing days, and a plan built from last year's text never finds out.
A day plan can look complete and still send you to a locked door. Whether it works once you're standing in front of the building depends on one thing: someone checked the hours.
MEVAYA exists because of exactly that gap. For every sight with fixed opening hours, we check the times by hand against a named source. The check date and source are shown on the stop. Open squares and parks have no hours to check, and we say so rather than inventing some. 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 reopening now expected from October 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 open every single day, according to the museum's official page at the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism (checked on 7 October 2026) — 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?
The claim alone proves little, so here is what you can check at MEVAYA: for every sight with fixed opening hours, we check the times by hand against a named source, and the check date and source are shown on the stop. The rest have no fixed hours to check — squares and parks that are always open, or streets and markets shown with typical hours and labelled as such. Where we can't confirm something, we say so instead of filling the gap.
Does MEVAYA use generative AI to plan?
No. The planner works from a curated set of stops and from opening hours we check by hand against a named source, and we check again every 30 to 120 days. Every fixed opening time traces back to a named source.
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.