About the project
Romania Guidebook is an independent travel publisher’s guide to Romania, written for people planning a trip from abroad. It covers attractions, cities, food, ready-made routes, transport, car rental, insurance and trip planning, in English and Russian.
The guide has been publishing since July 2026 and now holds over 120 guides. Every one of them shows the date it was last checked, and below we explain what that check involves: how topics are chosen, where each number comes from, and who does the work.
How topics are chosen
We start from what travelers search for before a Romania trip: how to get from the airport into Bucharest, whether a visa is needed, what a week’s itinerary looks like, what a rental car costs. A topic gets written when there is real demand for it, not because a place happens to be famous.
Where a guide recommends specific places, restaurants or venues, we only include those that are consistently well rated across several independent sources. One glowing review with silence everywhere else is not a consensus, and the place does not go in. We don’t reprint other platforms’ scores or review counts: a rating is a filter at the entrance, not content.
How every number is checked
Every price, timetable, distance and date in a guide is traced to the page of the operator that sets it: the railway, the bus company, the castle’s ticket office, the airport. That page goes into the guide’s source list, and the date we checked it is printed on the guide. Aggregators, booking marketplaces and other people’s blogs are not accepted as the source for a number.
Before a guide is published, an automatic check reads each number against those pages, and the build fails if the figure cannot be found on the operator’s site. On this site the sources you will meet most often are cfrcalatori.ro for trains, ratbv.ro for Brasov city transport, peles.ro and bran-castle.com for the two most visited castles, and airportcluj.ro for Cluj airport. Even so, a number is correct as of its check date, not forever: confirm the figure that matters for your booking on the operator’s side before you pay.
Photos and sources
Photos come from Wikimedia Commons, with the author and license printed under every frame. No stock imagery, and no frame reused across guides under different names: an automatic check blocks that too.
The source list at the end of each guide is the list we wrote from, not decoration. Many of the links are in Romanian, because that is where the current tariff or timetable is published, and we link them as they are.
How the guide is made
Research and first drafts are done with AI tools. An editor sets the topic, directs the research, checks the numbers against the sources described above and decides what gets published. The check date on every guide is the date of that editorial pass, and guides are rechecked as prices and timetables change.
The project is run by A. Kobtsev and is one of a family of twelve country guides built on the same editorial system, with the same source rules and the same automatic checks. That shared system is what lets a small publisher keep over 120 guides current.
Affiliate links and independence
Some links on the site are affiliate links: car rental, accommodation, tours, insurance, connectivity. If you follow such a link and book something, we get a small commission from the service. The price for you stays the same, and the project exists and is updated on these funds.
Partnership doesn’t affect selection: a place or service makes it into the guide for its ratings and the check, not because it has an affiliate program. If it’s better or more honest to recommend an option without an affiliate link, we recommend it.