Our Methodology
At LocalExperiences, we rely on factual, sourced data — never estimation or guesswork — to evaluate whether a city pass is worth buying.
How Prices Are Compared
We calculate individual ticket costs using the standard adult rate taken directly from the official ticket office or official website — never from a reseller’s listed price.
Booking Fees
If a landmark mandates an online reservation with an additional management or presale fee, this amount is explicitly detailed in our individual ticket breakdown — never silently folded into the base price.
Source Hierarchy
Every fact is sourced against a ranked hierarchy: (1) government or heritage-authority sites, (2) the attraction’s own official domain or ticketing operator, (3) the pass provider’s own product page, (4) official transport/tour operators. Secondary sources — travel blogs, resellers, aggregators — may be used to discover that a product exists or to sanity-check a price, but never as the sole basis for a published fact when a higher tier is reachable. When only a secondary source is available, we say so explicitly rather than presenting it as primary.
Inclusion Verification
Whether an attraction is included in a pass is verified against the official pass provider’s own documentation. We never infer inclusion from a pass simply being silent on an attraction — an absent relationship is recorded as UNKNOWN, not assumed to be either included or excluded.
Handling Uncertainty
We use three explicit internal states to record uncertainty rather than guessing: UNKNOWN (no relationship has been established either way), NEEDS_VERIFICATION (a figure was found but could not be confirmed with confidence against an official source), and SOURCE_CONFLICT (two official-tier sources disagree and the discrepancy has not yet been resolved). None of these ever render as a confirmed fact on a public page — a reader either sees a verified figure or an explicit note that it is unconfirmed.
Promotional Pricing
We only use standard base prices. We do not incorporate temporary discounts or reduced prices based on age or disability into our primary comparisons, as these vary by individual profile.
Pricing Analysis Calculation
Our analysis compares the sum of official individual tickets and public transport against the pass cost to evaluate whether genuine savings exist for standard travel profiles. We never draw an economic conclusion — "this pass saves you money" — without knowing what the pass actually covers first.
Catalogue Completeness & Pass Readiness
Each pass carries a catalogue status — Full catalogue verified, Partially verified catalogue, Free-choice quota model, or Coverage not yet assessed — shown on every pass listing, reflecting how much of that pass’s real inclusion list we have independently confirmed, not just how many attractions happen to be in our registry. Separately, before any pass gets its own dedicated guide page, it must clear a documented readiness bar checking that its price, validity, format and at least three attraction relationships are confirmed with a known status — a pass that fails this bar is never given a page that could imply a completeness it doesn’t have.
Image Policy
Every image used in production is downloaded and stored locally — we never hotlink an external image URL at runtime. When no verified photograph of the specific attraction is available, we use a clearly labeled representative image (e.g. a generic photo of a similar building or landscape) with an explicit caption disclosing that it is not the actual site, rather than publish no image or a misleading one.
How We Score Booking Friction
Separately from price and inclusions, some passes also carry a Booking Friction label — Low, Medium, or High — describing how much personal reservation effort the pass demands, not how good a deal it is. This is deliberately independent of "queue-skipping" or fast-track access: a pass can skip every line and still demand a lot of separate personal bookings, or offer no fast-track at all while requiring almost no reservation effort. We never mix the two. The score adds points, with no weighting or editorial judgment, across six dimensions we can verify directly from the pass's own registry record: who books each included attraction (the pass provider, or you personally); how many of those inclusions require a fixed, mandatory time slot; whether any of them carry their own separate reservation fee; whether the pass itself requires physical pickup rather than pure digital delivery; whether the pass needs a manual activation step before first use; and how many separate attractions you would personally have to book. The total is compared against fixed thresholds to produce Low, Medium, or High — and a pass is only given a label at all once we have confirmed who books at least two of its included attractions; otherwise we say nothing rather than guess.
Verification Protocol & "Last Verified"
Prices and booking rules change periodically. The "Last Verified" date represents the exact date a specific fact was checked directly against its cited authoritative source. If a source cannot be reconfirmed on the current date, the record remains on its last-known verification date rather than falsely updating it — a corrected fact is logged with the reason for the correction, never silently overwritten.
See also our Editorial Transparency page for our policy on commercial links and corrections.