Our standards.

We review businesses. We also sell access to some of them.

A restaurant in one of our films might also be a stop on a Vaya food tour. If you book that tour, we make money. You should not have to guess when that is true.

So we say it out loud, on camera, in the same breath as the recommendation. Not in the description. Not in small print at the end. One of these three lines, every time we name a business:

Four things we will not do.

• Nobody pays to be recommended. Our partners are paid to deliver a service. No business can buy a place in a film, on a tour route, or on this site.
• We take no sponsors. Vaya makes money when someone books something. There is no advertiser whose opinion we have to manage.
• We pay our own way. Meals, rooms and tours are paid for. If something is comped, we say so on screen, and the review runs the same either way.
• The recommendation comes first, the link second. Never the other way round. If we would not send a friend there with no money involved, it does not go in.

When we get it wrong, we fix it in public.

Prices change, rules change, and we make mistakes. When we learn something we published is wrong, we correct it where it appeared, and we say what changed rather than quietly editing it.

• Videos get a correction in the description and a pinned comment. If the error changes the answer, we re-cut or re-shoot.
• Guides and newsletters get the correction at the top, dated.
• Prices carry the date we checked them. If a number on screen is more than a year old, treat it as history.
• Tell us: hello@vayanews.com. We would rather hear it from you than leave it wrong.

Nobody appears without agreeing to.

• Everyone signs a release before we film, and can withdraw at any point before we publish.
• Everyone sees the finished piece before it goes out. Faces can be blurred and names withheld on request.
• Workers are named and paid properly. When we film a nurse, a driver or a guide, we say what they earn, with their agreement, and they are paid at or above the local market rate through a licensed employer. The point of any cost comparison we make is what a foreign income buys, never what a person is worth.
• Sensitive stories get a second read by someone who was not behind the camera. Health, family and money always count as sensitive.

Every figure is real, dated, and sourced.

• Real, not typical. When we say a month costs a number, it is one real person's actual month, not an average we assembled.
• Estimates are labelled. If we are guessing, we say we are guessing.
• We name the neighborhood, not the city. Rents, safety and traffic vary enormously between Makati, BGC, Poblacion and Quezon City. A number without a district attached is close to meaningless, so we do not publish one.
• Sources are linked wherever the figure is not our own.

Two more things worth saying.

• Nobody outside Vaya sees a piece before it publishes. Not partners, not the businesses in it, not anyone who pays us for anything.
• Our films and writing are made by people. We use AI for research and drafting behind the scenes, the way we use a search engine. We do not publish AI-generated footage, voices or people, and anything AI-generated that does appear will be labelled where it appears.

If we break one of these, tell us.