Editorial policy

Passport information decides whether someone catches a flight. So every factual claim on this site is either taken from an authoritative government source and cited, or it is not published. Unknown stays unknown. We would rather show a blank field than a confident guess.

• Invent or estimate office hours, phone numbers, or addresses.
• Claim live appointment availability. Government appointment inventory is not public data.
• Publish fees or processing times that we cannot link to an official page.
• Fabricate reviews, ratings, testimonials, credentials, or guarantees.
• Let advertising or a paid listing change a government fact or a directory record.
• Present ourselves as a government agency or imply government endorsement.

Facts are ranked by the authority of the source:

• Tier 1 — travel.state.gov, the Federal Register, official State Department datasets, and an embassy’s own site. Fees, forms, eligibility, and processing times may only come from Tier 1.
• Tier 2 — the facility’s own operator (a city clerk, library, or post office page) for local details like hours or parking.
• Tier 3 — mapping and business-listing providers, used only for optional enrichment (coordinates, a public rating) and always attributed.

Third-party aggregators are never treated as authoritative and never override official data. Full detail lives on sources and methodology.

Reviews, wait-time reports, and appointment reports are visitor-submitted opinions and experiences, not verified facts. They are held for moderation, labeled as traveler-reported, never merged into official fields, and removed if they contain personal information, abuse, or promotional content. Reported entries are re-reviewed by a human.

We use software, including AI assistance, to draft and translate explanatory content and to normalize imported data. No AI output is published as fact without a human checking it against a cited source. Our on-site assistant answers from our own sourced content and points to official pages; it does not speak for the government.

• Fees, forms, and processing-time pages: reviewed whenever the State Department publishes a change, and at least quarterly.
• Facility records: refreshed from the official dataset on each new release.
• Guides and service hubs: reviewed at least twice a year, with a visible last-reviewed date.
• Pages that fail our data-quality gate are held out of the search index until they are fixed.

Private companies — couriers, photo retailers — appear because they are relevant, not because they paid. Any commercial relationship is disclosed on the page where it applies. Editorial decisions are made independently of advertisers, and no advertiser reviews content before publication.

We fix errors quickly and say what changed. See the corrections policy, or email editorial@passportoffices.com.