Who writes it
The research desk at ScalePact, led by Hamza Liaqat. ScalePact builds direct booking systems for tour operators, which is the reason these pages read the way they do. We look at a tour listing the way the person who sells it does, so what interests us is transit time, hull type, what a rating is measuring and what the listing has left out. The full method, which is the same on every site we publish, is at how we research.
Nobody on our team has taken most of these trips. We say so on the pages themselves too.
What we did for Belize
This site currently publishes 26 researched pages: 11 experience guides, 8 destination guides and 7 planning pages. Behind them sit 74 individual bookable tours pulled from Viator, carrying 12,042 traveller reviews between them, 74 of which have a live booking link on this site today. Those counts are generated from the site's own data at the moment this page was built, not typed in.
Belize was the first site we published, before the research method on the ScalePact page was fully written down. We have not yet published the keyword counts, the booking-versus-reading split or the experience scoring for Belize the way we do for newer destinations. When that research run is complete, the numbers will appear here, dated. Until then we would rather leave this paragraph short than fill it with figures we cannot show you.
The travellers whose footage we used
On newer sites, when a detail comes from somebody's own recording of a trip, we name them on the page and link the video. For Belize we have not yet done that pass. No page on this site currently cites a named traveller's footage, and no page claims a first-hand account of a trip. Where a page says what operators tell us, that is what it is: what operators tell us.
What the Belize pages do draw on is operator-side knowledge. ScalePact works with tour operators in Belize on their marketing and booking systems, which means we see pricing rules, cancellation handling and review patterns from the seller's side. That is useful and it is also limited, and the limits are listed below.
What we do not have
- No traveller video or transcript evidence for any experience on this site, yet.
- No published keyword or search-demand numbers for Belize, yet.
- No first-hand account of any trip by a member of our team.
So those pages either wait for that evidence, or they say on the page that we have no first-hand account of that trip. What they will not do is make one up, which is the only reason this section exists.
How we order the tours
Review count first, then rating, then what the tour actually is. Nine hundred reviews at 4.5 ranks above eighteen reviews at 5.0, because eighteen people is not a sample. Every tour grid on this site is sorted by review count in the site's own code, so an operator cannot move up a grid by being listed first. We move a tour up by hand only when its rating is far better than the one above it and the review counts are close, and we leave one off the page when the rating is poor and there are too few reviews to explain why.
No operator has paid us for position on this site, and none ever will.
Prices
We are moving every price on this site to live Viator data so that we never write a price into a sentence. Prices move weekly. Where a page still shows a typed figure, treat the booking panel, which loads from Viator, as the current number, and tell us so we can fix the page.
When we get it wrong
We do. We have logged 3 corrections on this site so far, with dates. Email hello@bookbelizetours.com and we will answer inside two working days. What we changed and when is listed on our corrections page.
Research and judgement by Hamza Liaqat, ScalePact. Profiles and the rest of the team are on the about page.