Source Policy
Luxury Ship Index treats sources as a first-class part of the editorial product. Every material specification in a published profile is tied to a source row in the canonical record, with a public URL where possible, and rendered to the reader in the article's source notes section.
Short answer
Luxury Ship Index prefers official cruise-line, shipyard and classification-society sources. Reputable industry publications are used for context and for fields that official sources do not publish. Anonymous forums, AI-generated pages, scraped travel sites and OTAs with unclear data lineage are not acceptable as factual sources.
Key claims
- Every material ship specification is tied to a source row with a public URL where possible.
- Official cruise-line, shipyard and classification-society sources outrank everything else.
- Reputable industry publications fill gaps but never override official figures.
- Anonymous forums, scraped travel sites and AI-generated pages are never used as factual sources.
- Source URLs are rendered publicly in the article — not hidden in the CMS.
Preferred sources
Use first:
- Official cruise-line ship pages and PDFs;
- Official press releases and fact sheets;
- Official deck plans;
- Shipyard references (e.g. Meyer Werft, Fincantieri);
- Classification society data (Lloyd's Register, RINA, DNV, ABS, Bureau Veritas);
- Ship registry data;
- Regulatory documents (port-state inspections, IMO records).
Secondary sources
Used to supplement official data, fill missing fields and provide context. Where a secondary source disagrees with an official one, the official figure wins:
- Cruise Industry News;
- Seatrade Cruise;
- Travel Weekly;
- Baird Maritime;
- Other reputable maritime publications;
- Reputable luxury travel media used for design / amenity context.
Not acceptable as factual sources
The following may inform editorial questions, but are never used as factual sources:
- Reddit, TripAdvisor and Facebook groups;
- YouTube comments and anonymous forums;
- AI-generated pages or summaries;
- Scraped travel sites and aggregators with unclear data lineage;
- OTA pages where the underlying source is not visible.
Public source notes
Every analytical page renders a source-notes section that lists each source by name, links to
its public URL where available and shows the retrieval date. Outbound links use rel="noopener"; we do not use nofollow on links to official cruise-line, shipyard, classification
or reputable industry sources, because pointing to authoritative material is itself an EEAT signal.
Data conflicts
When sources disagree:
- Prefer the official cruise line, shipyard or classification source.
- Note the discrepancy if material.
- Do not average conflicting figures.
- Mark the relevant field as needing verification.
- Reduce the data confidence rating if the conflict affects interpretation.
Missing data
If a specification is not publicly available at the time of the last review, the field is left blank rather than estimated. Calculated metrics that depend on a missing input are themselves left null, and the affected score components fall back to a neutral value with low confidence.
Limitations
Source URLs may move, redirect or break over time. Where a source URL goes stale, the Research Desk verifies the field against an alternative official source, updates the record and logs the change in the article's changelog per the corrections policy.
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