This corrections policy explains how to tell us something on Botswana Travel Guide is wrong, what we do with the report, and how a correction is made and shown. We would rather be corrected than be tidy about it: on a country where park fees, gate hours and road conditions all move, reader reports are one of our most useful sources.
How to report an error
Send it through the contact page. It helps enormously if you include:
- The page and, if you can, the sentence — a quoted phrase is easier to find than a description.
- What we got wrong and what is correct, as precisely as you can put it.
- Where your information comes from — a gate receipt, an official notice, a link, or simply “I was at the gate on this date”. First-hand reports often arrive long before an official page is updated.
You do not need to be certain. “This looked wrong to me” is a perfectly good report; we would rather check ten of those than miss one.
What our corrections policy does with a report
Every report is read by a person. We then verify the point against the source hierarchy in our editorial policy — statutory and governmental sources first, then official tourism and treaty bodies, then peer-reviewed and specialist material.
One of four things follows.
- Confirmed error. We correct the page.
- Confirmed as written. We leave it, and if the page was ambiguous enough to mislead a careful reader, we rewrite it anyway.
- Cannot be resolved. Where sources genuinely conflict, we say on the page that they conflict, give both positions, and name the authority that can settle it, rather than picking one quietly.
- Out of our scope. Prices, availability and review scores belong to booking partners; we publish none of our own and cannot amend theirs. A booking dispute goes to the partner or the property.
Anything bearing on safety — vehicle requirements, convoy rules, water, fuel, closures — goes to the front of the queue.
How corrections are made and disclosed
- Factual corrections are made in the text and the page’s last-updated date changes.
- Substantive corrections carry a note. Where a correction changes the meaning of a page — a reversed fact, a wrong requirement, anything that could have altered a reader’s plan — we say what was changed and when, rather than editing silently.
- Typographical and stylistic fixes are made without a note.
- Where a source has changed rather than where we were wrong, we say so, because the distinction matters to anyone weighing how much to trust the rest of the page.
What is most likely to go stale
Some categories decay predictably, and we keep an internal register of them so they are re-checked on a schedule rather than when somebody complains.
- Park entry, vehicle and camping fees, including proposed increases that are announced, deferred, and sometimes quietly reinstated.
- Border post opening hours, where official tables are known to lag reality by years.
- Road, track and gate status — seasonal flooding, closures and restricted access, which can change within a week.
- Concession operators and camp names, which change hands more often than most guides admit.
- Flight routes and schedules into Maun, Kasane and Gaborone.
Facts in these categories are date-stamped where they appear, and carry an instruction to confirm with the relevant authority before you travel. That instruction is not a disclaimer to skim past: it is the honest limit of what any guide, including this one, can tell you in advance. See our travel planning section, and the about page for how the site is researched.