About StayByCity

StayByCity is a travel guide for people who want to spend their time in a city well. We pick the destinations that reward a visit, and we write about each one with care.

How we work

The shortlist is data-driven. We score cities from open data — GeoNames, OurAirports, and Wikidata — weighing the density of things worth seeing far more heavily than raw population, so that compact, rich cities aren't buried under sprawling ones.

The guides are drafted with AI and checked against sources. Each one is written against a strict brief — fixed sections, checkable facts, and a rule against naming a place we cannot vouch for — then put through separate critical readings and a fact-check that may only settle a question by pointing at a source, and corrected before it goes out. A new guide can go live without a person approving it first: the photographs are reviewed after publication. Data decides who makes the list; a person decides what stays.

The photographs are not ours. They come from Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons or public-domain licenses, and every one carries its author, its license and a link back — chosen by looking at it, not by trusting a filename. A handful of food covers are the exception: where no freely licensed photograph of a dish exists anywhere — we check — the cover is an image we generate ourselves with AI. Some of these look like photographs, but none of them is one: no one took them, so they show what the dish looks like, not a real table or a real place. Each one says so in its caption, and is replaced as soon as a real, freely licensed photograph turns up.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or a city we've missed? Use the contact form — we read everything.