What you can expect from our writing, and an honest account of how a two-person journal stays independent.
Last updated: 12 May 2026.
Romantic Holidays is published by Romantic Holidays Media LLC, an independent media company based in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. This page sets out the principles behind our writing and a complete picture of how the journal is funded. We keep it in plain language on purpose.
Every destination, inn and restaurant described in this journal was visited by both of us — Claire and Ben Hartley — traveling together as the couple we write for. We book anonymously, pay full published rates, and take our own notes and photographs. We do not compile guides from other publications, commission ghost-written itineraries, or publish AI-assembled travel advice dressed up as experience. Where a detail is secondhand or unverified, we say so in the text.
We accept no hosted travel, complimentary stays, free meals, gear placements or payments of any kind in exchange for coverage. Hotels, tourism boards and tour operators cannot buy, influence or remove a mention in our pages. No one outside the editorial team sees an article before publication. If this ever changes for a specific piece, that piece will carry a disclosure at the top — not buried at the bottom.
Romantic Holidays has exactly two sources of revenue:
That is the entire list. We carry no affiliate links: nothing in our guides pays us a commission if you click it or book it. We sell no trips, no bookings and no products. When we name a hotel, restaurant or boat operator, it is a factual report of where we stayed and what we did — there is no financial relationship behind any mention. If our funding model ever changes, this page will change first.
Travel details age quickly: prices climb, restaurants change hands, seasons shift with the climate. We date every article, print prices as we paid them, and update guides when we return to a destination or when a reader correction checks out. We still urge you to verify time-sensitive details — reservations, opening hours, transport — with official sources before committing money. When we get something wrong, we fix it visibly: substantive corrections are noted on the article itself. Write to [email protected]; one of the two of us answers personally.
A romance journal deals in judgment as much as fact, so we separate the two on the page. Stage times, costs and logistics are reported as facts and checked as facts. Whether a town is "the most romantic in Italy" is an opinion, ours, formed on the ground and argued between us before publication — and we write such judgments in a voice that makes their subjectivity plain. Where our tastes run against the consensus, we tell you what the consensus is so you can calibrate.
Our articles are written and edited by the people named on them. We may use software for spell-checking, image processing and similar chores, but the traveling, the opinions, the arguments and the reconciliations are entirely human.
We collect as little personal data as we can and we never sell it. The details live in our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy.
