How we read reviews
A travel site that summarises reviews is asking you to trust it. This page is how you check.
01 / 06
The question this answers
A woman planning a trip on her own makes a dozen decisions about places she has never seen. The information exists, in thousands of reviews, in forum threads, in the ninth paragraph of a blog post. Reading it takes an evening she does not have, and asking a group means posting where she is going and waiting for a reply.
Sola reads it in advance and writes down the part that changes a decision. Everything else on this page is about keeping that honest.
02 / 06
Whether we know a reviewer is a woman
Usually we do not, and where we do not, we do not claim it.
None of the major review sources record who wrote a review. Booking.com publishes traveller type as solo, couple, family, group or business, with no gender. Airbnb’s review guidelines prohibit references to gender. Agoda publishes country and room type. Google and TripAdvisor have no gender field at all.
One source is different. Hostelworld displays the reviewer’s gender, age range and home country alongside the review text, and its own data protection notice says so. It has no way to filter or summarise by that field, so the signal sits there readable one review at a time.
So this site draws a line. Where a read is built from reviews positively identified as written by women, the page says What women said and prints the number of reviews and the source. Where it is not, the page says What the reviews say and states plainly that the source does not record who wrote them. You will currently see the second heading on every property page on this site, because the first is a claim we have not yet earned.
03 / 06
What we do with a review
- 01
We collect the published reviews
From the property listing and the major review platforms, along with the operator’s own stated information about check-in, reception hours, guest policy and cancellation.
- 02
We pull out only what is checkable
A fact you could verify yourself: the reception is staffed overnight, the wifi does not reach the rooms, the walk from the main road is ten minutes and unlit. We drop adjectives that carry no information, which is most of them.
- 03
We write it in one voice, in plain language
A language model does the drafting from those extracted facts. It is given the review material and told to invent nothing.
- 04
A rule set rejects the result
Every line is checked against a written standard before it can appear: it must carry a checkable noun, it must not contain judgement adjectives, and it must not promise an outcome. Lines that fail are rejected rather than softened.
04 / 06
What we will not say
You will not find the word “safe” used as a promise anywhere on this site. We can tell you a reception desk is staffed through the night, that a street has lighting and foot traffic at 11pm, that a door locks from the inside. We cannot tell you that you will be fine, and a company that says so is selling you something it does not control.
We also do not repeat the figure that 84% of solo travellers are women. It is widely quoted and it does not trace to a study. Where a number is useful, here is one that has a male comparison group: 55% of women name personal security as a concern when travelling alone, against 18% of men. (Hostelworld, State of Solo Travel 2025, survey of 3,334 travellers.)
05 / 06
What we actually cover
19 countries, 75 cities and 1,548 places to stay, weighted heavily towards Southeast Asia. That is small next to a booking site with millions of properties, and it is meant to be. The point is depth in one region rather than a thin layer over the world.
Restaurants and things to do appear inside city pages rather than as pages of their own. They do not yet carry enough of their own information to be worth a page, and publishing thousands of thin ones would make this site worse.
06 / 06
When we get it wrong
Reviews go stale, properties change hands, and a summary can miss the one line that mattered. If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix the page.