How we check
Where our facts come from, what the labels mean and how often we look again. Written from what the site and its scripts actually do.
Short answer
We read the official source first. Each page carries its sources and the date we read them, and a script we run every week flags changed sources.
Where the official wording is vague, we show it first and put dated reports beside it, labelled as reports. Where we have nothing to stand on, the page says it is still being checked.
The order we read sources in
Every source on a page is tagged with one of these types, best first:
- Legal text: the legal text itself: a law, a regulation or a published announcement.
- Official explanation: an official explanation or news item, such as a TAT or government portal article.
- Official institution: an institution’s own schedule or guidance, such as a central bank holiday list or the TDAC manual.
- Publisher’s official page: the page of the company or guide that makes the claim, such as the MICHELIN Guide’s own list or a restaurant’s own website. It shows what the publisher says about itself, not a government or independent check.
- Secondary source: anything else, such as reviews and articles. Used to find or compare, never presented as official.
- Owner’s on-site photo: a photo the site owner took on the spot, shown with the date it was taken. First-hand, but not an official document.
An official explanation alone does not fix the exact scope, times or exceptions of a legal restriction when the legal text can be found.
When the official wording is vague, we show the wording as published first and the dated reports beside it. The two are never merged into one sentence.
A value that only reports support is shown as a report, with the report’s date. A value with no source we have read is not stated.
If an official page cannot be read, we say so and do not fill the gap from a blog or a search summary.
What the labels beside a value mean
The words in the first column are the ones the pages show. The table is built from the pages’ own text, so a label that is renamed there changes here.
| Label as shown | What it means | Where to see it |
|---|---|---|
| No label | The value comes from the operator’s, airport’s, ministry’s or railway’s own page. Nothing is shown beside it. | Suvarnabhumi Airport |
| Based on reviews | Only guides or traveller reports back the value. Read it as a report, not a rule. | Suvarnabhumi Airport |
| Still checking | We have no value we can stand behind yet, so the page says so instead of guessing. | Suvarnabhumi Airport |
| From the site owner | The site owner’s own experience, dated where it has a date. One person’s account, not a rule. | Suvarnabhumi Airport |
| From our own rides | What we found by using the service ourselves. Our experience, not a rule, and not always the same. | Suvarnabhumi Airport |
| Per the seller’s page | Taken from the seller’s own page: the product as the seller describes it, not an official rule. | Suvarnabhumi Airport |
| Official | The statement rests on the official text. | TM30 notice |
| Two sources agree | Two or more sources agree on it. | Vape rules |
| Reports only | Only reports support it. Shown with their dates, apart from the official wording. | TM30 notice |
How often we look again
Every page with sourced facts shows the date they were last checked (a hub shows each place’s own date): the day we read the source, never the day the site was published. It does not mean a rule took effect then, or that nothing has changed since.
Each week we run a script that fetches the recorded source pages for the stay rules, alcohol rules, holidays, TDAC, stay paperwork and the rules pages, and compares each with a fingerprint recorded when we last read and accepted it. Once a month it runs over every source recorded in the site’s data, except a few pages scripts cannot open, which we re-read by hand. It reports only that a page changed; we then open it, read it and change the data by the usual rules. A page the script cannot reach is never treated as unchanged.
Bangkok places carry their own check date. The weekly run lists any place, or group of places, whose check date is more than 120 days old so its hours get read again. It is a warning list: a page is not hidden or changed because of it, and keeps showing its old date until we have re-checked.
Records that build up by script
- Lottery results are read on draw days, every 20 minutes from 16:10 to 19:30 Bangkok time, from the Government Lottery Office and published only when a second site agrees on every number.
- The air-quality page keeps two ledgers written only by a script, never by hand. We run it each week; it re-reads the last seven days, so a late upload can update a recent day. A day is recorded only from measured hours, and nothing is estimated. The page stops showing our own averages for a month once the official monthly report exists.
Where changes are recorded
The updates page lists new pages, re-check dates and price checks. No line on it is typed by hand: it is worked out from the site’s data, and existing lines are only added to, never rewritten.
The stay-paperwork pages also carry their own “What changed, and when” table, where each row is added as it happens.
A fuller list of rule changes, with announcement and effective dates, is kept in our working notes and is not published yet.
What we do not do
- We do not give legal, medical or immigration advice. Where the official text says the final decision is the officer’s, we say so on the page.
- A stay result is an estimate, not a promise of entry or of an extension. We do not collect passport details and do not fill in or submit the TDAC for you.
- We do not invent numbers. A value without a source we read is not stated, and a ledger row is never estimated or back-filled.
Affiliate links
Some pages link to a service you can book, such as a transfer or a ticket. These are affiliate links: we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. They never affect our dates, rules or sources.
They sit in a separate block marked “Affiliate link”, apart from rule answers and price tables. They are never in a sources list, and an official link is never labelled as an affiliate link.
What an affiliate link can carry is described on the Privacy page
Tell us where we are wrong
Email contact@thailandlifetools.com with the page address and the name of the item. If you can, add the official page that shows the right value.
Subject line, for example: Correction: /thailand-tipping/ – taxi tip
We check a report against the source before changing anything. If it holds, we fix the page and update its check date; after the next publish the updates page shows that new date, if it is a date that page records. Individual reports are not listed there.
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