Farfables

How we verify

Anyone can list a hotel. The work worth doing is checking that it is real, that it is still open, and that the photographs are not lying to you — and then saying plainly what the catch is.

What a stay must carry before it is published

A stay cannot go live on Farfables until its record is complete. This is not a checklist we promise to follow — it is enforced in the database itself, so no tool, script or person can publish around it. Every published stay has:

A date it was last verified, shown on its page. If you don't see one, we haven't stamped that stay yet — see below.
An honest "what's the catch" note specific to that property. A generic line about the category doesn't satisfy it.
A note on what it costs, so the price bracket isn't a surprise.
At least two independent sources behind the facts we state.
At least one real photograph and a working website of its own.

What gets in at all

We only catalog places that are genuinely extraordinary — independent and story-worthy, where the building or the setting is the reason to go. Generic chains and ordinary rentals are out. The rare exception is a chain property where the structure itself is the wonder; that comes in through a manual lane, never automatically. A stay's experience category is decided by confirmed rules, not by asking a language model to describe it.

How it stays true after publication

Photographs are re-checked nightly. A link that has rotted is not a photo — a stay whose images have gone dead is hidden rather than left showing a broken card.
Every stay is re-checked on a 90-day cycle.
Automation can only ever take a stay down, never put one up. There is no code path that publishes or reinstates a stay; that is always a person re-verifying it. To delist a stay we require primary evidence — the property's own site says it has closed. To hide one, the problem has to show up on two consecutive checks, so a temporary outage can't empty the catalog.

Verification is never for sale

Whether a stay is verified, how it ranks, and whether it is featured are decided by these standards alone. No property can pay to be verified, and none ever will be able to. Some outbound links earn us a commission — that is explained on the affiliate disclosure page — and it changes none of the above.

Where the data comes from

The base inventory is drawn from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, and enriched only from each property's own website. We crawl politely: one page, honouring robots.txt.

The honest caveat. The complete-record rule became machine-enforced in August 2026. Stays that were already published before then were not retroactively invalidated, so a small number of older entries may not yet carry every field above — which is exactly why the last-verified date is printed on the page rather than claimed in general. A stay showing no date has not been through the full check yet. We are working through the backlog, and we would rather show you the gap than paper over it.

Spotted something wrong, or know a place we're missing? Tell us, or email hello@farfables.com — a person reads every tip before anything changes.