Editorial policy
CarryRules is published by an independent editorial operation. This page states who is responsible for what is on the site, what the standards are, and what we will not do.
Who is responsible
CarryRules is responsible for every rule published here. Rules are researched and drafted by automated systems working against official sources, under editorial standards set and published by CarryRules; no rule reaches the site unless it passes them. Where this page says "we", it means that editorial operation — a contact is available through corrections.
Nobody pays to appear on CarryRules. No authority, airline, retailer or duty-free operator has any say in what a rule says, and no rule is written, withheld or softened for a commercial reason.
The standards a rule has to meet
- Primary source only. The authority that makes the rule, or the instrument that binds it. Never a forum, a blog, a news article, an airline's summary of someone else's rule, or another aggregator.
- Quoted, not paraphrased into existence. Each rule stores a verbatim sentence from its source. If we cannot quote it, we do not publish it.
- Checked at the source, not from memory. A rule's quote must be found in the live document before publication, and again whenever the rule is reviewed.
- No averaging. When two sources disagree, we go back to the instrument and read it. We do not publish the middle of two numbers.
- Silence is reported as silence. Where an authority publishes no rule for an item, the page says so. We do not stretch a neighbouring rule to cover it.
How automation is used, and where it stops
Automated systems read official sources, extract the rule and the sentence that states it, and re-check that sentence against the live document. That is where the effort of this site lives: in the reading, the checking and the structure, not in prose written around a number.
Automation does not decide what is true. A machine reading that cannot be confirmed at the source is not published. A contradiction between sources is resolved by reading the instrument, not by preferring the more convenient answer. Every rule carries the document it came from so you can check our reading against the authority's words.
Mistakes
We will make some. A border rule can change the week after we read it, an authority can move a document, and a reading can be wrong. When a mistake is reported or found, the rule is re-researched at its source and corrected, and the correction is visible in the rule's dates. Serious corrections are listed in updates. We do not quietly overwrite a number and leave the date untouched.
Independence and money
CarryRules may carry advertising and may earn affiliate income from travel products. That income never sits inside an answer: a rule page states the rule, and nothing on it is placed, ordered or worded to serve an advertiser. If that ever stops being true, this page changes first.
What we do not publish
- Legal advice. We state what an authority publishes; we do not tell you what to do about your case.
- Rules we cannot source. An unsourced rule is worth less than no rule, because it reads as though someone checked.
- Predictions. Announced changes are recorded with their effective date; we do not guess at what an authority will do.
- Pages built around search phrasings. A page exists for a country and an item because that pair exists, not because someone might type it.