How we verify

Official sources only

Every timing, closure window and access rule traces to the organiser's own published material — athlete guides, course maps, closure notices, transport schedules — or to the relevant city or transit authority. Each is listed at the bottom of the guide with the date we checked it and the exact fact taken from it.

We never take logistics from another guide. Courses, shuttle windows and cutoffs are revisited annually, and second-hand data goes stale silently. Other sites are useful for working out which races need covering. They are not a source of truth about what happens on race morning.

We read past the headline number

Race information is written for people who already know the race, and the sentence that changes your plans is usually not the one in bold.

Athens publishes a 06:45 bus cutoff, then adds, in a separate note, that the last bus from one specific boarding point leaves at 06:15. Berlin publishes entrance times by block, then adds that one of its two gates is closed to anyone carrying a clothing bag. Tokyo publishes a seven-hour limit, then specifies it runs from the gun rather than your chip. Each changes where a runner should sleep, and each is a clause rather than a heading.

Finding them is the work. It is why a guide takes hours rather than minutes, and why we cover fewer races than a database would.

Vetted by the editor

Every guide is vetted by the editor before publication — H. Ahmad, an enthusiast runner who finished the Nilai 3 Half Marathon in Malaysia in 2005, and has been passionate about marathon racing ever since. No logistical fact reaches a live page without being checked against the organiser's own source and dated.

Found something that looks wrong? Email ahmad@marathonstay.com with the page URL and the specific point to be corrected, and it will be checked and updated.

Everything is dated, and expires on purpose

Each guide shows a "last verified" date. Facts that change between editions — shuttle windows, last departures, corral closures, closure rings — are stored separately from the prose, so they can be re-checked without rewriting the page.

Past twelve months without re-verification, the site automatically withholds the specific times and tells you to confirm with the organiser. It does not keep displaying numbers that may have moved. A guide that goes stale degrades into a safe guide rather than a dangerous one, and the build itself refuses to ship a page that has aged out.

The same rule applies to facts an organiser has not published yet. Where a 2027 start time or closure notice is still outstanding, we say so rather than carrying last year's number forward as though it were current.

How we choose which races to cover

Races are selected on measured search demand and constraint severity, not on fame. Several famous, logistically brutal races turn out to have almost nobody searching for accommodation guidance — those don't get pages, however interesting they are to write about.

We also check there is genuinely bookable accommodation for race week before writing. A race so oversubscribed that every bed has vanished makes a good story and a useless guide.

How this site makes money, and what that does not buy

We earn a commission when you book accommodation through the map on a guide, or through a link in the text. That commission is the same wherever you choose to stay, which is the important part: we are paid for you booking, not for you booking somewhere particular.

Zone recommendations are written before availability is checked, and the ordering does not change based on what is bookable or what pays more. The answer box and the verified logistics table carry no commercial links at all — those are facts, and mixing commerce into them would undermine the only thing this site has to offer.

Nobody can pay to be recommended, and nobody can pay to have a constraint softened.