Our editorial policy

Travel content has a credibility problem, and it is deserved. Much of what is published about fares, fees and refunds is written by people who have never issued a ticket, sourced from other articles by people who have never issued a ticket, and updated only when traffic falls. What follows is specific enough that you can hold us to something different.

Start here: this site is new

An editorial policy that describes a long-running review programme, a roster of named reviewers and a corrections log full of past entries would read better than this one. It would also be false. Zeptotravel is new. This site has not been through a full review cycle, no correction has yet been issued under the policy below, and there is no archive of past versions to point at.

So read this page for what it is: the standards we are adopting, published before they have been tested, so that they can be used against us later. That is a weaker claim than a track record and we are not going to dress it up as a stronger one. It is also the only claim available to anyone publishing for the first time, and the useful question is not whether a site is new but whether it tells you so.

Two things follow. First, everything below is written as an undertaking — what will happen when a reader reports an error, how often pages will be re-read, what we will never do — rather than as a description of how things have gone. Second, where a standard depends on something we do not yet have, we say so rather than implying the capability exists.

Who writes, and who is answerable

This site publishes no named author personas. That is a deliberate choice and worth explaining, because a grid of smiling specialists with job titles is the industry norm and its absence looks like an omission.

An invented byline is the cheapest trust signal in this business to manufacture and the most difficult for a reader to check. A photograph, a plausible name, fifteen years of fictional airline experience: none of it can be verified from outside, and a great deal of it is not real. Rather than ask you to take our word for a staff list, we attribute pages to the desk that wrote them and publish the thing that can actually be checked — the primary documents each subject area is written against, listed in the table above and in the source panel on every guidance page.

What accountability means here, concretely: the desk is answerable for every factual claim, rule statement and figure on every page, whoever drafted it and whatever tool produced the first draft. There is no separate editorial department to blame and no author to hide behind. When something on this site is wrong, it is ours, and the corrections policy below is how we handle it. If Zeptotravel grows to the point of having genuine named specialists, their names will appear here — and not a day before.

The review cycle we are adopting

The commitment: guidance pages are re-read against current rules at least twice a year, and out of cycle whenever something moves underneath them — US Department of Transportation rulemaking, a shift in Federal Trade Commission guidance on fee disclosure, a widely adopted change in supplier policy, or a reader telling us that what we published no longer matches what a supplier is enforcing.

That last trigger is the one we currently rely on most, and it is worth being straight about why. An established desk learns from its own call volume that a published rule has drifted. We do not have call volume yet, so until we do, the corrections route below is doing work that experience would otherwise do. If you find a page that no longer matches what a supplier told you, telling us is genuinely the fastest way this site gets better.

The last reviewed date means the whole page was re-read against current rules on that date. It does not mean the page was rewritten. A review that confirms the content still holds is a real review and the date moves; one that finds a material error produces a correction under the policy below. On a new site those dates sit close to publication, and they will only become informative once several cycles have passed — a fact worth knowing before you read a review date on any travel site as evidence of anything.

Sourcing: cite the rule, not the blog

Our sourcing hierarchy, in order of preference: the regulation itself; the supplier's own governing document — contract of carriage, rate rule, rental agreement, booking conditions; and the supplier's published policy pages. Secondary coverage — travel blogs, aggregator explainers, forum posts — is not a source for anything we assert as fact, however often repeated. A fourth tier exists at most agencies, the documented practice of the desk itself, and we are not using it: we have no desk practice to document yet, and we are not going to present a plausible-sounding industry generalisation as something we have observed.

So we write "under US Department of Transportation rules, most tickets on flights to, from or within the United States booked at least seven days before departure may be cancelled without penalty within 24 hours of purchase" rather than "you get 24 hours to cancel any flight". The first is checkable and carries its own limits; the second is a half-truth that strands whoever bought a ticket the day before flying.

We do not name individual airline or rental brands as examples of a rule unless it is generic and well established — for instance, that most US carriers no longer charge a domestic change fee on standard economy while basic economy is normally excluded. Supplier policies change without notice, and a page hard-coding one brand's position ages into misinformation. Where a rule is unsettled or varies so much by supplier that no general statement is safe, we say so instead of picking a side.

Prices, ranges and other numbers

Dollar figures in our guidance are illustrative market ranges, compiled from published fares, published rental rates and supplier tariff schedules and refreshed at each review. They are not prices we have quoted — we have not been quoting — and they are never offers or guarantees. A range like "typically $20–$35 per day" describes a market, not your rental; the binding number is the one an advisor confirms for your dates, and even that is unreserved until ticketing. The controlling document is price accuracy and fare rules; our own fees are published at post-ticketing service fees.

We publish no statistics about ourselves at all. There are no customer counts, savings figures, satisfaction scores, award badges or press logos here — not because they are being kept back, but because there are none. An unverifiable number is worth less than no number, and a number a new business could not possibly have earned is worse than either. The same rule applies to accreditations: where we hold none, the site says so rather than leaving a gap for you to fill in.

Corrections

We will get things wrong. Suppliers change rules quietly, a range drifts, a fare rule gets read too generously. A new site will get things wrong more often than an old one, because nothing has been through the loop yet. What matters is what happens next.

To report an error, email support@zeptotravel.com with the page address, the sentence you believe is wrong, and the rule or supplier document that says otherwise if you have it. It reaches the desk directly — there is no support queue for it to sit in.

What we commit to. Acknowledgement within two business days. If the report is right we correct the page, move the review date and — where the error was material, meaning it could have changed a booking decision or a traveller's understanding of a cost or a right — state on the page what was wrong and when it was fixed, rather than editing it away in silence. If we disagree we say so and name the source we rely on. No correction has been issued under this policy yet, because the site is new; the first one will be visible on the page it belongs to, like every one after it. Bad advice given on a call is a service matter, not an editorial one: raise it through the escalation path on our contact page.

Where commerce stops and guidance starts

Zeptotravel will earn from supplier commissions, consolidator margin on negotiated air fares and our own published service fees. All three, including how they could bias us and the fact that none has yet been received, are set out on how we make money — linked from here deliberately, because independence claims mean nothing unless the commercial arrangements are visible beside them.

The separation we commit to: no supplier pays for a recommendation in our editorial guidance, no supplier reviews our content before publication, and commission rates do not determine what these pages advise. Where a commercial arrangement affects what is shown, or the order it appears in, it is labelled on that page. There is currently no paid placement anywhere on this site, and if that changes the label will appear before the money does.

Use of AI in drafting

We use large-language-model tools in producing this site, and would rather say exactly how than leave you guessing.

What they are used for: first drafts worked up from briefs, regulations, supplier documents and filed rule texts; structural work such as organising a long explainer into sections; rewriting dense industry language into plain English; and consistency checks across many pages. What they are not used for: deciding what a regulation or fare rule says; generating prices or any figure; drafting legal, compliance or disclosure wording; producing quotes, testimonials or anything presented as a real person's words; or inventing examples then presented as desk experience.

Every page is checked by a person against the underlying source before publication. The desk is accountable for every factual claim, rule statement and number on it, however the first draft was produced. If a drafting tool produces a plausible-sounding rule that does not exist — the characteristic failure mode, and a real risk on a site written largely from documents rather than from years at a counter — catching it is the checker's job, and a page published with such an error is a process failure, correctable under the policy above. Tell us when you find one.

Accessibility and plain language

Guidance only a travel professional can parse has failed at the thing it exists to do. We write for a reader who is intelligent but not in the industry: terms are defined on first use, sentences carry one idea, and we do not use a term of art where an ordinary word does the same work. Where jargon is unavoidable because it is what the supplier will say to you — record locator, contract of carriage, collision damage waiver — we teach it rather than avoid it.

Structurally, pages use a single H1 and a descriptive heading hierarchy, tables carry captions and header cells, links describe their destination rather than saying "click here", and colour is never the only carrier of meaning. How to report a barrier is in the accessibility statement. If any content here is not usable for you, tell us — an advisor will complete the task with you by phone while we fix it.