This guide is not a directory of every business in Nha Trang — the rest of the portal already does that. It is a short, curated list of places our editors have looked at closely and are willing to put our name behind. This page explains exactly how that works, what the numbers on a place page mean, and where the line is between what a machine computed and what a person decided.
What this guide is
Being included in the guide is itself the endorsement. We do not publish every candidate we look at — historically we publish roughly one in ten. A place that isn't in the guide isn't necessarily bad; it may simply not have been reviewed yet, or it didn't clear our bar this time around.
Everything past that — a shield, a named award, a critic's visit — is an additional layer on top of the base endorsement, not a replacement for it.
Two layers that never mix
Every place page has two kinds of information, and we keep them visually and structurally separate on purpose.
Evidence is computed, grey, and always shown with its source and sample size: Google's rating breakdown, how guests rate specific things like food or service, how many reviews are from Vietnamese speakers versus visitors, what topics come up most often. None of it is opinion — it is arithmetic over data we already collected, and every number says exactly how many reviews it is based on.
Verdict is editorial, gold, and always written by a person: whether a place is in the guide at all, its shield level, named awards, and the verdict quote itself. This is where we tell you what we actually think.
We deliberately do not publish a single combined score (no "87/100"). With the sample sizes a city guide realistically has, a single number would be false precision, and it would just compete with Google's rating instead of adding anything. Evidence tells you why you can trust a verdict; it never replaces one.
Where the data comes from
The Evidence panel is built from a scrape of the place's Google Maps listing, dated on the page. We publish aggregates only — rating breakdowns, topic frequencies, computed shares — never a reprinted review. Nobody's review text is republished on our site.
Photos on the guide are our own — either taken by our team on a visit or re-hosted with permission. We do not publish Google's photos as our own content.
Our sample-size rules
The rule that matters most on this page: below a threshold, we show nothing at all — never a hedged number, never a dash, never a greyed-out guess. Silence is more honest than a number we don't trust.
- Per-topic ratings (Food, Service, Atmosphere, etc.) only appear once we have at least 8 analysed reviews carrying that rating.
- The local/visitor mix only appears once at least 10 reviews are tagged with a review language.
- A place with fewer than 50 total Google reviews is marked as having too little data for the finer breakdowns — the rating and count still show, but we don't build dimension bars or a local-mix chart out of a handful of reviews.
- AI-generated summaries are always phrased as "guests often mention…", never asserted as settled fact.
Shields and awards
Shields (one to three) are our editors' overall enthusiasm rating for a place, granted by hand after a review. Named awards recognise something specific — best seafood, best value, and similar categories — with a stated criterion.
Neither is for sale, and neither can be requested or purchased. They are granted, changed or removed solely by editorial judgment.
The firewall between money and editorial decisions
Money never buys inclusion in the guide, a shield, a named award, or a place in a curated collection. If we ever run sponsored placements, they will be clearly labelled as sponsored, kept out of the "best of" collections and shields, and will never influence a verdict. A business declining to advertise with us has no effect on how we write about it — and neither does buying an ad make us write more kindly.
Corrections and re-review
If something on a place page is wrong — a closed business, an outdated fact, a factual error in our text — tell us and we will look at it promptly. Published places are re-reviewed at least once a year, or sooner if something changes materially (ownership, quality, a closure). A place can also be quietly removed from the guide if it no longer meets our bar; removal isn't announced or explained publicly, the same way inclusion isn't a permanent guarantee.