Methodology

How Luxstay collects, structures, validates, and updates the data on every page. The summary below is intentionally short — auditable detail lives in the codebase and the sources registry.

1. Step 1

   Curate destinations

   A human-curated list of destinations defines the Year-1 catalog (60 Vietnam destinations across three priority tiers). Curation considers search demand, traveler intent, and geographic coverage — not editorial favouritism.

2. Step 2

   Hydrate from open sources

   For every destination we fetch records from GeoNames (geography, population, timezone), Wikidata (cross-locale identifiers), Wikipedia (narrative summaries), and OpenStreetMap (POIs). Raw payloads are attributed to a row in the entity_sources audit table so we can trace every fact back to a source.

3. Step 3

   AI structuring (extract, never invent)

   Source data is fed to Anthropic's Claude with a tightly-scoped extraction prompt. The model is instructed to extract — not invent — factual values. Where source data is missing, the field is omitted rather than hallucinated. Each call returns a JSON document validated against a Zod schema before it touches the database.

4. Step 4

   Cost & audit logging

   Every Claude call writes a row to the content_generations table recording the model, prompt version, token counts, latency, and cost in USD. This makes content economics transparent and lets us regenerate specific pages without re-running the whole catalog.

5. Step 5

   Comparison engine

   Head-to-head comparison pages are generated from already- extracted destination facts — Claude only writes the comparison narrative, never the underlying numbers. Data points displayed in the comparison table are derived from structured facts, not free-form text.

6. Step 6

   Update cadence

   Source data is re-pulled on a scheduled cadence (Year 1: monthly). Pages are regenerated when source data changes meaningfully or when the prompt version is bumped. Every regeneration increments the page's generation_version so historical content is auditable.

7. Step 7

   Affiliate independence

   Editorial content (rankings, comparisons, recommendations) is produced before any affiliate or partner data is layered on. We never re-rank destinations or hide negatives based on commission. Affiliate links are clearly disclosed and tracked separately from page content.