Editorial Policy
How ExtraChicago researches, fact-checks and updates its Chicago guides — and who stands behind them.
- ✓Every guide is researched against official sources and reviewed by the editorial team before it publishes.
- ✓Time-sensitive facts — prices, hours, festival dates, hotel rates — are flagged to verify rather than frozen into the prose.
- ✓Recommendations are editorial and curated; where Booking.com affiliate links appear, that relationship is disclosed and never decides what gets covered.
Who writes and edits these guides
ExtraChicago's guides are written, edited and maintained by The Extra Chicago editorial team. Compiled and maintained by the ExtraChicago editorial team from official sources — Choose Chicago, the CTA, museum and landmark operators, and public data. Guides are reviewed and updated regularly. We don't accept payment for inclusion.
Each page carries a visible byline and a last-updated date, so you always know who stands behind the advice and when it was last checked. Authorship here is attributed to the publishing team, never to an invented individual persona — a rule we hold to across every guide on the site.
How we research and fact-check
We build each guide from primary and official sources: Choose Chicago (the city's official tourism board), the City of Chicago, the CTA and Ventra for transit, Metra for commuter rail, the individual museums and landmarks (the Art Institute, the Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, Adler Planetarium, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, the Chicago Architecture Center, the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust), the National Weather Service for climate data, and public data more broadly — cross-checked wherever a claim can be verified. Where a fact is a matter of local knowledge or editorial judgment rather than a citable source, we say so.
We separate the durable from the perishable. Chicago's history, geography, architecture and neighborhood character are stable, so we state them plainly. Prices, opening hours, ticket tiers, festival and event dates, and hotel rates change constantly, so we flag them to verify against the official source rather than freeze a number that will mislead you by the time you travel. Named annual events — the Chicago Blues Festival, Lollapalooza, the Chicago Marathon, Christkindlmarket and the rest — are written as evergreen, dateless pages for exactly this reason; we describe the typical month or season, never a specific date we can't guarantee.
Curation, disclosure and corrections
Recommendations here are editorial and curated — the extra work happens before publication, in the shortlist, not in listing everything. Some Where to Stay pages link out to Booking.com, and a booking made through those links can earn the site a commission; we disclose that plainly, and it plays no role in which properties, neighborhoods or areas we choose to cover. We don't accept payment for inclusion elsewhere on the site.
We review the guides regularly and re-check seasonal and practical details against their official sources, re-dating pages when we revise them. If you spot an error — a closed venue, a changed transit line, a detail that's out of date — tell us and we'll fix it and note the update. Reader corrections are one of the main ways the guide stays accurate between reviews.