How We Build Our Guides

We think you deserve to know how a recommendation got in front of you. Here's exactly how each city guide is built — and where the limits are.

Where our data comes from

Every guide starts from real-world signals, not a single blogger's afternoon. For each city we pull together official place data (hours, location, category, and aggregate visitor ratings from Google's Places data), structured research on what each spot is actually like with children, and — increasingly — feedback from parents who've been there. We run no sponsored listings and take no payment to include or rank a place.

How we score and curate

A long list of “things to do” isn't useful. So every candidate place is filtered and scored before it earns a spot:

• Age fit. We tag each place for the age bands it genuinely works for (0–3, 3–5, 6–10, 11–14). A hit with a 10-year-old can be a meltdown with a toddler, and we say so.
• Wow vs. effort. We weigh how memorable a place is against how much it costs a family in lines, logistics, and stroller battles — so a five-star adult attraction that's miserable with kids doesn't get a free pass.
• Failure modes. We flag the specific things that go wrong for families (no shade, long queues, no changing tables, set-time tickets) so you can plan around them.
• Skip lists. We're willing to tell you what to avoid, with a concrete reason and a better alternative. Saving you a bad afternoon is as valuable as recommending a good one.

What “verified” means — and doesn't

When we mark a place verified, it means its core details have been cross-checked against current sources, not that one of us personally visited it that week. We're a small team covering hundreds of cities, and we'd rather be straight with you than pretend we've tested all 38,000+ places with our own kids. That's the honest trade-off behind covering the whole world: broad, carefully-researched coverage, openly corrected when a real parent tells us we got something wrong.

How parents keep us honest

Guides improve when families who've actually made the trip weigh in. Spot something out of date, closed, or just wrong for your kids? Tell us — every correction makes the next family's trip better. You can reach us any time on the contact page.

Keeping guides current

Places change — hours shift, attractions close, new ones open. We re-check and refresh guides on an ongoing basis and date them so you can see how fresh the information is.

— The Kidworthy Team · Last updated June 2026