How we review at Time Out

At Time Out, we love cities as much as you do. That’s why we spend so much time exploring and researching the world’s greatest cities to bring you the best things to do, see, eat and drink. How do we know what’s best? We send real people, our global team of local experts, to experience restaurants, bars, museums, theatres, galleries, movies and more. They use that experience to curate guides you can trust. When we say ‘best’, we really mean it.

Our team of Time Out experts spends its time testing and tasting our cities. Wherever we can, we do this quietly and anonymously, and we pay our way. We also accept free experiences, but it never influences our ratings. We never take money for our editorial reviews or recommendations (discover more about our policy on commercial content). We do this in over 300 cities around the world, from London to Los Angeles, Madrid to Melbourne, Barcelona to Brisbane.

Our reviews are rigorously researched and carefully crafted – designed to help you, our city-loving audience, decide where to spend your time and money in the city. More than anything, they’re designed to be useful: to assist you with planning your night or day out in the city. We write for both locals and visitors, as we believe both need an expert, curated guide to the city. We also write for all ages and budgets. Our guides should feel varied, diverse and considerate of a wide range of tastes and interests. We want you to discover a city’s hidden gems, as well as re-discover its crown jewels.

If we don’t like something we’re reviewing on your behalf – a restaurant, for example, or an art exhibition – we don’t publish a review of it and we exclude it from our guides and trusted curation. We don’t want to waste your time with something we honestly can’t recommend.

When we do recommend something, we give it a star rating: three stars for good, four stars for very good, five stars for excellent. When you see Time Out’s stars, you can trust us. Why? Because you can be sure that we’ve done our homework and we take our job seriously. We genuinely want you to have a great time in the city.