Editorial Policy

01 Editorial principles

Every page published on cooeetours.com.au is governed by five non-negotiable principles. They've remained stable since we first formalised this policy in 2018 and they apply equally to a 200-word destination card and a 5,000-word state guide.

02 Research & sourcing

Every Cooee Tours destination page is built on a layered hierarchy of sources. We give weight to information in roughly this order:

Source tier	Examples	How we use it
First-hand	Site visits by guides, on-tour guest feedback, our own bookings data	Primary source for opinions, ratings and "what to expect" descriptions.
Official	Tourism Australia, state tourism bodies, Parks Australia, BOM, Smartraveller, ABS	All factual claims about climate, fees, opening hours, visa rules and safety.
Operator-direct	Hotels, restaurants, tour operators, transport providers	Pricing ranges, capacities, seasonal closures — verified directly with the venue.
Reputable media	ABC, The Guardian Australia, Traveller, Australian Geographic, peer-reviewed journals	Background context, historical detail, science-based claims (e.g. reef health).
Community	Verified guest reviews, traveller forums, social posts	Sentiment indicators only — never the sole basis for a factual claim.

We do not lift content from other tour operators' websites, AI chat tools, or unverified user-generated content. When we link to an external source, it's because we want you to be able to verify what we've written for yourself.

03 Fact-checking

Before any new destination guide or itinerary page is published, it passes through three stages:

1. Author check. The writer verifies every factual claim against at least one source listed in the table above. Claims about prices, distances, opening hours and travel times are flagged for review even if the writer is confident.
2. Editorial review. A second editor independently verifies anything time-sensitive, plus any superlative claim ("the largest", "the oldest", "the only"). Statistics get a date and a citable source.
3. Local sign-off. Where possible, regional content is reviewed by a Cooee guide based in or regularly travelling to that region. They flag anything that has changed on the ground but hasn't yet hit the official sources.

04 Authors & contributors

All travel guides on cooeetours.com.au are written or co-written by people who have visited the destinations they describe. We don't outsource content to anonymous SEO writers. Each long-form piece is bylined with the author's name, a short biography and a link to their full profile.

Our core editorial team includes:

• In-house writers based in Brisbane and Melbourne, all with a minimum of five years' Australian travel-writing experience.
• Cooee tour guides who contribute first-hand observations from the regions they work in. Guide-contributed sections are flagged at the top of the relevant section.
• Regional specialists — freelance contributors with deep knowledge of a specific area (e.g. Indigenous-owned tourism in the Top End, viticulture in Margaret River). All freelancers sign our contributor agreement, which incorporates this editorial policy.

You can see the full team on our About page. Every author who appears under a Cooee Tours byline has agreed to write under their real name and to disclose any conflicts of interest.

05 Independence & disclosures

Cooee Tours is a working travel agency. That means we sell some of the tours, accommodation and experiences we write about — and we want you to understand exactly how that affects what you read.

Tours we operate

When a tour or itinerary is one we operate or resell, we say so plainly within the page. We don't disguise sales pitches as objective recommendations.

Third-party operators we mention

Many of our destination guides reference operators, restaurants and accommodations we don't have any commercial relationship with. We include them because they're genuinely good. We do not accept payment to be listed in editorial content.

Affiliate links

A small number of pages contain affiliate links to booking platforms, transport providers or insurance products. When we use them, we disclose the relationship at the top of the page. Affiliate revenue never determines what we recommend or where we place a recommendation.

Hosted visits & press trips

Our writers occasionally accept hosted stays or press trips from regional tourism bodies. When this happens, the resulting content carries a "Hosted by..." disclosure line, and we retain full editorial control over what we write.

06 Updates & freshness

Travel content goes stale faster than almost anything else online. Prices change, restaurants close, ferries reroute, national-park fees jump in line with the new financial year. We've built our publishing process to keep up:

• Annual full review. Every destination page is reviewed end-to-end at least once every twelve months. The "Last reviewed" date you see in metadata reflects the most recent review — not just the most recent typo fix.
• Trigger-based updates. Major changes (border policy, ATAS standards, new national-park fee schedules, weather-driven access changes) trigger an out-of-cycle update across every affected page within 14 days.
• Reader-flagged updates. When a reader or guest tells us something has changed on the ground, we verify and update within 7 days where the change is material.
• Versioning. This editorial policy itself is versioned (you're reading v3.2). Significant changes are summarised at the bottom of the page.

07 Corrections & complaints

We make mistakes. When we do, we want to know about them and we want to fix them visibly.

Minor corrections

Typos, broken links, formatting issues and dated-but-not-misleading information are corrected silently. The page's "Last reviewed" date is bumped.

Substantive corrections

If we have published something that was factually wrong — not a matter of opinion, but a verifiable error — we add a clearly marked correction note to the foot of the page, dated, explaining what was incorrect and what the new information is. We do not silently rewrite history.

Complaints

Formal complaints about editorial content can be sent to editor@cooeetours.com.au. We aim to acknowledge complaints within 2 business days and to respond substantively within 10 business days. Where a complaint relates to our trading conduct rather than editorial content, please contact us through our standard customer service channels or escalate via the ATAS complaints process.

08 Use of AI tools

We use generative AI tools selectively in our editorial workflow. We think readers are entitled to know exactly where and how, so:

• What we use AI for: grammar checking, headline brainstorming, formatting consistency, alt-text suggestions, translation drafts, and summarising large reference documents (e.g. multi-hundred-page parks management plans) for our writers to then verify against the source.
• What we don't use AI for: writing destination guides, reviews, or recommendations. We don't publish AI-generated travel imagery as if it were real photography. We don't fabricate guide bios or quotes.
• Verification. Anything an AI tool helps generate — even a translation or a summary — is checked by a human author against the underlying source before publication.

09 User-generated content

Some pages on cooeetours.com.au include guest reviews, traveller-submitted photos and Q&A entries. This content is moderated, but it represents the views of the guest and not Cooee Tours. We:

• Verify that reviews come from confirmed customers before publishing.
• Don't edit reviews for sentiment — only for legibility, defamation risk, or to redact personally identifying details about third parties.
• Don't remove negative reviews unless they breach our content standards (e.g. abusive language, false claims of fact, identifying staff by name).
• Display the most recent reviews most prominently and never bury negatives behind positives.

10 Contact the editor

If you've spotted an error, want to flag a recent change on the ground, or have feedback on this policy itself, write to us. We read everything and we appreciate the trouble you've taken to get in touch.