Methodology

What this site claims, how it establishes it, and how it earns.

1. Sourcing

Every factual claim on this site carries three things: a source you can check, the date it was last verified, and how it was determined — whether we measured it ourselves, took it from an official publication, or relied on a third party such as a booking site.

This is enforced rather than intended. Facts live in a structured data layer, and the site fails to build if a factual field is missing its source or date. Prose is generated from that data, which means a number cannot reach you without provenance attached.

Where a fact cannot be sourced, it is left out. Words like “approximately” and “typically” are not used to smuggle in a figure nobody checked.

2. Walking distances

“Distance to the Haram” is not one measurement. It is at least four, and conflating them is why published figures disagree so widely:

• Distance to the boundary of the mosque complex
• Distance to a specific named gate
• The walk from that gate to the Mataf, where tawaf is performed
• All of the above during peak crowd control, when routes change and gates close

A hotel advertised as “two minutes from the Haram” may be two minutes from a gate that is then a long, slow walk from the Mataf. Both numbers are true. Only one of them answers the question a pilgrim is asking.

So distances here are reported as:

• Door to a named gate, in metres and walking minutes, by a consistent method applied the same way to every hotel, with the gate always named.
• The gate-to-Mataf leg described separately, in words rather than minutes. That stretch depends on crowd levels, season and which routes are open. Putting a number on it would be false precision, so we describe it instead.

3. Prices and facts that change

Nightly rates are never hardcoded into prose. Prices move constantly, and a figure typed into a page once is misinformation within weeks. Where price appears, it is either a broad band or fetched live.

Other facts change on their own schedules, and are re-checked accordingly: permit and visa rules monthly, transport and hotel status quarterly, distances annually. Any page relying on facts like these shows the date it was last verified.

4. How this site makes money

Some links here are affiliate links. If you book through one, this site may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.

Three commitments follow from that, and they are not negotiable:

• Commission never influences a recommendation or a ranking. Where two hotels are genuinely comparable, we say they are comparable rather than inventing a reason to prefer the better-paying one.
• No booking guarantees. We do not control availability, prices or reservations, and we will not imply otherwise.
• Affiliate links are disclosed on every page that carries them.

5. Corrections

If something here is wrong, it gets fixed rather than defended. A correction means the underlying data is re-verified, the source updated, and the verification date reset — not a quiet edit.

We do not issue religious rulings. For anything touching ritual or regulation, we describe the logistics and point to official sources such as Nusuk and the Ministry of Hajj and Umrah.