How we research, check and correct these travel guides

This is a shop, so the guides here have a commercial interest in what you buy. The answer to that is disclosure and restraint, not pretending otherwise. Here is exactly how a page gets made, and what happens when one is wrong.

The four rules

1. A source or a measurement, never a vibe. Every dimension, weight limit, fee and regulatory claim is traceable to a named page or regulation, and the link is in the sources block. Where we calculate something, such as the volume of a sizer box, the page says it is a calculation and shows the working.
2. Blank beats guessed. If an airline does not publish a cabin weight limit, the cell in our table is blank. Every large language model and every competitor round-up will happily fill that blank with a number that reads well. A blank cell is more useful than a confident wrong one, because it tells you to check.
3. Limits carry the date they were read. Baggage rules change on the airline schedule, not on ours. Every row in the carry-on size and weight checker shows the date the airline page was read, and the page states plainly that the airline own page governs.
4. Say what we do not know. Where the honest answer is that a figure is not published, or that a claim cannot be verified, the page says so. Compression bags are a good example: no manufacturer publishes a comparable compression ratio, so our guide explains the mechanism and gives you a test to run instead of quoting a percentage.

How an airline figure gets onto this site

1. Open the airline own baggage page for the region you are looking at. Not a comparison site, not an aggregator, not a travel blog, not another airline page quoting them.
2. Read the number, the unit and the fare conditions around it. A limit that applies to a paid fare or a specific route is recorded with that condition attached, not flattened into a single figure.
3. Record the removal of anything not stated. If the page lists dimensions but no weight, the weight cell stays blank.
4. Write the read date into the row. The date is when the page was fetched, not when this page was last edited.
5. Re-read the page when the guide is next updated, and change the date even if nothing else changed. An unchanged figure with a current date is a claim that we checked it recently, and that claim should be true.

How the tools are built

Every calculator on this site publishes its inputs, its formula and its assumptions, so you can disagree with the arithmetic rather than the conclusion.

1. The packing list generator computes quantities from a laundry interval rather than from trip length, and the per-item volume and weight assumptions are printed in a table directly under the tool. If you think a top is 1.4 litres rather than 1.1, you can see exactly which number moved and by how much.
2. Nothing in any tool is hard-coded output. Change the inputs and every row recomputes.
3. Tools are checked against real inputs before publication. The generator was run against a 3 night carry-on summer trip and a 10 night checked winter trip as a minimum, plus edge cases such as a single night and a 90 night trip.
4. Where a tool cannot know something, the page says so. The generator cannot know whether your clothes will fit the shape of your bag, and it says so in a callout rather than implying a guarantee.

What we will not do

Corrections

If something here is wrong, out of date or cites a page that has changed, tell us and we will fix it and date the change. Reach us through the contact page.

Use these next

Sources