How we work
Behind every travel page on HolidayWow are open data, a firm style guide for our writing and a cycle that keeps pages current. Here you learn where our information comes from and how we check it.
How a page is made
- 1
Data package
For every page we put together a data package: climate for all twelve months, airports and flight times, places nearby, comparisons with similar destinations and travel knowledge from Wikivoyage.
- 2
Writing
From this package comes the page's text, written with the help of AI to a firm style guide: in plain English, addressed to you, concrete, free of advertising language. Every section records which data it is based on.
- 3
Checks
Every page passes automatic checks before it goes live. Every number in the text must be in the data package, wording from sources is never copied, and pages that are too similar to each other are rewritten.
- 4
Live values
Anything that can change, like flight times, direct routes or the number of destinations from an airport, is not fixed in the text. The page loads these values from our database on every visit.
Our data sources
| Source | What we use it for | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| NASA POWER | Daily values for air temperature, precipitation and solar radiation from 2006 to 2025, averaged per month. We calculate sunshine hours from the radiation following FAO-56. | public domain |
| NOAA OISST | Sea temperature as the monthly mean for 1991 to 2020, for every coast and island. | public domain |
| OurAirports and OpenTravelData | Airports, distances and existing direct routes from your airport. We estimate flight times from the distance. | public domain and CC BY |
| Overture Maps | Places such as beaches, sights, restaurants and nature spots, with information on whether a place is open. | CDLA Permissive 2.0 and ODbL |
| Wikidata and Wikivoyage | Basic data on destinations, regions and how they relate, plus travel knowledge as a source of facts. We write our texts in our own words. | CC0 and CC BY-SA |
| Wikimedia Commons | Freely licensed photos of destinations, each with author and licence on the image. | CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA |
| MET Norway | Current weather and the forecast for the coming days on the weather pages, loaded fresh on every visit. | CC BY 4.0 |
How we keep pages current
After every update of our data we check which sections rest on changed information. We rewrite exactly those sections; the rest of the page stays as it is.
Separately, we review every page again after about a year at the latest, even when the data has not changed.
When a page's content changes substantially, we show the update date below the headline. Small corrections and live values do not change that date.
What the data means
Climate values are long-term averages: they show what you can expect in a month. The weather on any given day can differ, which is what the current forecast on the weather pages is for.
Flight times are estimates based on the distance between airports. You find the exact times of your flight when you book.
The HolidayWow Beach Index combines sea, air, rainy days and sunshine in one open formula.
Tips and partner links
Below some sections you find tips that match the text right above: a tour to the gorge it mentions, stays in the places named or the ferry to the island. Our texts and data are written regardless of which tips exist.
Links to other companies are marked Partner. When you book through them, we earn a commission; your price stays the same. We show at most three such tips per page and never in the middle of an answer.
Orlero (connections by ferry, train, bus and plane) and Orbislo (eSIMs for your destination) belong, like HolidayWow, to Orlero UG (haftungsbeschränkt) i. G.
Images and licences
Our photos come from Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia and Wikidata (public domain, CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA), from Openverse with photos from Flickr and other open collections (public domain, CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA), from Pexels (Pexels Licence) and from Unsplash (Unsplash Licence). We only use licences that allow editing and commercial use. Photos from Unsplash are embedded directly from Unsplash; all others are stored as our own copy on our servers.
For photos from Wikimedia, Openverse and Unsplash we name the author, the licence and the source right on the image: a small i in the corner shows the details. At the end of every page and every trip, "Photo credits" lists all these photos with links to the licence and the original source.
Some photos are from Pexels (pexels.com).
HolidayWow editorial team
HolidayWow is run by Orlero UG (haftungsbeschränkt) i. G. in Frankenthal, Germany. We welcome notes about a page, an error or a source by email at holidaywow@orlero.com.
