About us, and how this guide chooses its entries

We start with a house, the destination comes after

Most guides start with a country, then look for somewhere to sleep. We do the opposite. We come across a house or a hotel, we verify what can be verified, and the destination follows. This is not a pose, it is what determines what we publish: a destination we could not back up with a specific property does not appear on the site.

The consequence can be read in the structure. The selection comes first, the country and destination pages come after. The catalogues are split in two, houses and villas on one side, hotels and lodges on the other, because you are not booking the same thing: an entire property whose keys you hold, or a room in an establishment with a reception desk. A nightly price does not mean the same thing in the two cases, and mixing them would make any budget filter misleading.

Three criteria, looked at in this order

A property enters the selection if it passes three filters. The order matters, the first eliminates the fastest.

• A detail found nowhere else, and one that photographs. An infinity pool, a bed outdoors, a bathtub facing the open sea. If a place rests on its description alone, it will not hold up in front of a reader either.
• A story, and someone behind it. Owners, an architecture, a point of view. This criterion rules out large faceless operations on its own.
• A point to watch out for, stated openly. What is awkward, what is missing, what may disappoint on arrival. It is this third point that makes the first two credible.

The point to watch out for is mandatory on every entry, without exception. An entry with no reservations reads like a brochure, and the reader senses it before the end of the first paragraph. We have set this mechanism out in detail, with examples, in an article in the journal.

Nine properties belong to us, and the site says so

We may as well state it straight away, it is the first thing a wary reader should be able to check. Nine of the properties listed belong to the group that publishes this guide. They are marked Maison Naïades in our CMS. They receive no editorial favours and carry the same mandatory point to watch out for as the others.

The “visited by the team” field tells the same truth. It is set to true on these nine houses in Réunion, which the group owns and runs. It is set to false on every other property, written from research and verified sources. We do not describe a stay we have not made, and we do not count on the reader not checking.

What we do not do

Four rules. They cost us something, and that is precisely what guarantees they hold.

• We do not reuse a property’s photographs without written permission. The consequence, accepted: some entries show a dark background and the words “Photo to come” rather than a generic image showing something other than the place. For location images, a verified open licence and a visible credit in the format “Photo Author, licence”.
• We do not settle a price in silence. When the property and the platforms do not quote the same amount, the entry carries both and says so. The reader decides where to book, knowing the facts.
• We do not publish an unconfirmed fact. A property with a fact that is not confirmed stays in draft, for as long as it takes to verify it.
• We do not remove a point to watch out for. Not at a property’s request, not in exchange for a commercial agreement, and not on our own houses.

How the guide makes money

Every entry carries a direct booking link to the property. Some also carry a Booking.com affiliate link, which pays us if a booking is made, at no extra cost to the reader. It is written here, not in small print at the bottom of the page.

Three statuses exist in our CMS, and they denote three different relationships.

• Maison Naïades, the group that publishes the guide runs the property.
• Partner, there is a commercial agreement with the property.
• Selection, an editorial favourite, with nothing given in return, of any kind.

What a commercial agreement does not buy, neither a place in the selection, nor the removal of the point to watch out for, nor a change to a recorded price, nor a favourable verdict, is written in full on the page for hoteliers and owners. A property that does not even reply to our request for photo permission keeps its place in the selection.

Where the guide stands today

For now the selection is limited to Réunion, plus five unusual properties in Europe and Morocco. The journal has three articles. This is a guide that is just beginning, and we would rather write that here than let anyone believe in a worldwide catalogue that is already complete.

The scope will widen property by property, at the pace of what we manage to verify and get authorised. A short selection that holds up seems more useful to us than a broad one that does not. If a property is missing, it is not an oversight: it is a property we have not verified yet.