How we select

What does it take to be on The Puglia Edit?

The Puglia Edit is an independent guide to masserie, palazzi, trulli, boutique hotels, resorts, hotels and villas in Puglia. A stay is listed when three things are true. It is a place to sleep in Puglia of one of those types, it has an official site of its own, and at least three of its facts can be confirmed with a verbatim excerpt from an official page.

The bar is wide on purpose. We list masserie, palazzi, trullo retreats, boutique hotels and resorts, and also four-star hotels in towns, self-catering masserie and small guesthouses.

Each is typed plainly: a hotel is a hotel, not a masseria. We still leave out places without a site of their own and anything we cannot confirm against an official page.

Price plays no part in the selection. The list spans all five price bands, with 67 of the 169 stays in band 1, 53 in band 2, 35 in band 3, 11 in band 4 and 3 in band 5, and 120 of them sit in bands 1 and 2.

The list covers the whole region. We divide Puglia into 14 areas, and every comune belongs to exactly one of them, from the Valle d’Itria and Santa Maria di Leuca to the Gargano, Bari and Trani, the Alta Murgia, Taranto, Brindisi and the Monti Dauni. An area page goes live only with at least five stays, and a stay is published whether or not its area page is.

Borgo Egnazia, Masseria San Domenico and Masseria Torre Maizza were once held back because their own sites blocked our reader. They are listed now, and nothing was bypassed.

For those three, the Region’s register gives the type, the category and the address, and what we could not read on the property’s pages shows as “not confirmed”. A short page is no judgement on the property itself.

We do not score, rank or review. There are no ratings and no guest quotes, only facts with their sources.

We label a stay a masseria when its own site presents it as one, a word explained in What is a masseria, and how to choose one.

Where do the facts come from?

From primary sources: the property’s own site, the MICHELIN Guide for awards, and official tourism bodies, comune sites and UNESCO for places and areas. The Regione Puglia accommodation register, published as open data, is an official source for a stay’s type, category and address. We do not copy descriptions, ratings, reviews or photos from booking sites, Tripadvisor, Google, the press or social media.

Every fact on a stay page has an evidence entry: a short excerpt of at most 25 words copied from the page, with its address and the date we read it. A fact we cannot find stays blank and appears as “not confirmed”. That is different from “no”, and we never turn one into the other.

Our fetcher identifies itself, respects robots.txt and makes at most one request per second to a domain. It never bypasses bot protection. Where a site blocks automated readers, a page is read with a different tool and marked so that it can be spot-checked.

When a property’s own domain disallows robots, the page published by the hotel group that operates it counts as official.

Some stays are run by a hotel group and have no site of their own beyond the group’s. For those, the group’s page for the property is the official source, and the stay page links to it. Booking sites never count.

AI drafts the texts from each property’s official pages, and each draft is checked against those same pages. The final sign-off by a person, due before launch, is still pending.

Stay covers are drawings generated for the site. Photographs appear only with a property’s written permission.

What do the price bands mean?

Bands run from 1 to 5 and describe a double room in high season. The scale is written down, so that every stay is placed against the same thresholds.

Band	Nightly rate, double room, high season
1	Under €250
2	€250 to €450
3	€450 to €750
4	€750 to €1,200
5	Over €1,200

No stay publishes a dated high-season rate for a double room that we could read. Three of the 169 back their band with a double-room rate published on their own site, with no season or date, and all three are under the €250 line. We place them in band 1 and do not mark their bands as estimated.

A few other stays also publish an undated double-room rate, and their bands are still marked as estimated. For the other 166, the band is our own estimate.

We set it from positioning: the type of property, its size, its services and how the property presents itself on its own pages. We flag each band for human review and mark it as estimated on the stay page, in the tables and in the open data.

One stay publishes a suite rate with no season and no date. A suite with no season tells us nothing about a high-season double, so its band is an estimate too.

A band tells you the level of a stay; for a price, ask for the rate on your dates. If a stay publishes a dated high-season double rate, its band will follow that rate and lose the estimated mark. A “from” price appears only with an official source and a date, and we never write “best price”.

How are distances calculated?

Distances are straight lines, measured from the stay’s coordinates to the coast and to the airports of Bari and Brindisi. The coastline comes from the OpenStreetMap boundary of Puglia.

We show a distance and a map pin only when the position is known at building or street level. When we know only the locality or the comune, the distance reads “not confirmed”, so that the center of a town never passes for a position. Drive times appear only when a property’s official page states them, and then with that page as the source.

Distances are computed from data and not repeated in the text, so a corrected coordinate updates every page at once.

How are collections built?

A collection is a rule applied to verified facts, with no hand picking. One rule rests on an estimate: the honeymoon rule uses our estimated price band. The luxury rule uses no band of ours, only the Region’s category.

A missing fact never qualifies a stay, and a collection is published only with at least five qualifying stays. Where five or more stays in one area meet a rule, that area also gets a page of its own for that collection. The rules are:

Collection	A stay is included when
Spa retreats	Its official information confirms a spa
Honeymoon	It is in estimated price band 3 or higher, and it is adults only, has a spa or has a private beach. Every band of 3 or higher is an estimate of positioning, never a confirmed rate
Luxury	The Regione Puglia accommodation register lists it as a five-star hotel, with or without the luxury designation. This is the Region’s classification, independent of our price bands
Families	Children are welcome, and it has family rooms or a kids’ club
Adults only (not published yet: fewer than five stays qualify)	The property says it is adults only
Pet-friendly	Pets are allowed, or allowed on request
By the sea	It is under 2 km from the sea in a straight line, or it has a beach club or a private beach
Open in winter (not published yet)	It is open year-round, or at least three of the five months from November to March
Michelin dining (not published yet: no stay verified so far, as the MICHELIN Guide has not been checked yet)	A restaurant at the stay holds a MICHELIN star in the MICHELIN Guide
Design-led (not published yet)	The property names an architect or designer
Exclusive use	The property states that exclusive use is available

The “Best for” labels on stay cards and tables are computed, never hand-set, and a fact we cannot confirm gives no label.

• Families: the stay says children are welcome.
• Weddings: it says it hosts weddings.
• Groups: it offers exclusive use.
• Wellness: it has a spa.
• Winter: it is open at least three of the five months from November to March.
• Beach: it has a private beach or a beach club.

What does the number on each stay mean?

Each stay carries an edition number, such as No. 103. The leading digits are the area, in the order of our area list: the Valle d’Itria is 1 and Santa Maria di Leuca 8, then the Gargano 9, Bari and Trani 10, the Alta Murgia 11, Taranto 12, Brindisi 13 and the Monti Dauni 14. The last two digits count the stays within the area, so the first stay of the Gargano is 901.

A number is never reused when a stay leaves the list, so gaps can appear. The number identifies a stay in this edition and says nothing about rank.

What does Last verified mean?

Every stay page shows a Last verified date. It is the day we last checked that stay’s facts against the property’s official pages.

It dates the information and cannot promise it is still true today. Rates, opening months and services change, so confirm what matters with the property before you pay.

Have the editors stayed there?

The editors have not visited the stays on The Puglia Edit, and every stay page says so in a single line under its summary.

The facts come from official pages instead, each with its source and the date we checked it, so a reader can check them too.

Does anyone pay to be included?

Nobody pays to be listed, and there are no paid placements.

Some booking links may earn us a commission through affiliate programs. We show a disclosure next to every such button, and these links never change which places we include or what we say about them. The full terms are on the Affiliate disclosure page.

Where a page raises a question about events or places to see, we sometimes link to Andiamo in Puglia (andiamoinpuglia.it), an Italian-language guide to events and places that is a sister project made by the same founder.

How do I ask for a correction?

If a fact is wrong or out of date, or if you run a property and want a correction or a removal, use the For properties page. Send the page, the fact, and a link to an official page that shows the right information.

We change a fact when an official source supports the change, and we update that stay’s Last verified date.

How are the other languages made?

English is the master. Every text is written in English and copy-edited against its sources before anything else happens to it.

Only then is it localized: facts, numbers, sources, internal links and structure stay the same, while examples, units, date formats and starting points for getting there are adapted to the readers of that language. Each localized page then goes through a separate review in that language, which rewrites what sounds translated before the page is published. For every page, in English and Italian, the final sign-off by a person is still pending.