Last updated: 6 August 2026
Most travel sites do not tell you how they know what they claim. This page does, including where our knowledge stops.
Who writes IslaVisit
IslaVisit is edited by John Paul Medalla, who is Filipino and based in the Philippines. The site began as a personal research project, because the travel information already online about ferries, budgets and where to actually stay was often outdated or written by people who visited once, years ago.
IslaVisit’s guides are written with the help of AI — used for research, organizing information and drafting — and every guide is then reviewed, fact-checked and edited by John Paul before it goes live. Destination guides and personal-perspective posts carry his byline; highly researched resource articles — visa, transportation and budget guides, and comparisons — are credited to the IslaVisit Editorial Team, reflecting that they are built from multiple sources rather than one person’s account. Each guide’s byline and author box says which applies, and links back to this page.
Research-led, not trip-report-led
IslaVisit is not a travel diary. We do not publish trip reports, and we do not claim to have personally stayed in every hotel we list. What we do is the unglamorous work most blogs skip: checking fares against operator timetables, entry requirements against government portals, and prices in pesos against what things cost right now rather than what a blog quoted in 2019.
Being in the Philippines is the advantage here. We can check a ferry schedule on a Philippine operator site, read local reporting, and think in pesos rather than converting stale dollar figures. Where a guide is not based on a personal visit, it says so and shows the sources it draws on instead.
Where our figures come from
- Entry rules and visas: the Philippine Bureau of Immigration and the eTravel portal, never a secondhand blog summary.
- Exchange rates: the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas reference rate at the time of writing.
- Transport costs: published fares from airlines, ferry operators and booking platforms, cross-checked across more than one where possible.
- Accommodation prices: current listed rates, quoted as shoulder-season ranges rather than single figures, because Philippine rates swing 30 to 60 percent by season.
- Sample budgets: built arithmetically from the per-category costs published in the same guide, so the totals always reconcile with the detail above them.
How we handle recommendations
No company pays to appear in a guide, and no merchant sees a draft before publication. We earn commission on some bookings, explained in full in our Affiliate Disclosure, but commission does not decide what we recommend. Where we think something is overpriced, we say so, including for companies we earn from. We also recommend plenty of things we earn nothing on, because sometimes the right answer is to book direct.
Keeping guides current
Every guide carries a visible last-updated date. Price-heavy guides are reviewed on a rolling basis, and we re-check anything time-sensitive, such as entry requirements or terminal fees, whenever we touch the page. A guide that has not been checked recently will say so rather than pretend otherwise.
Corrections
If a price is wrong, a route has changed, or a property has closed, tell us at support@islavisit.com. Corrections are made quickly and the date is updated. We would rather be corrected than be confidently wrong in public.