About the project
USA Guidebook is an independent travel publisher’s guide to the United States, written for people planning a trip from abroad: which state to fly into, how to get a rental car out of the airport, what a national park charges at the gate, how to ride Amtrak between cities. Since July 2026 it has grown to over 170 guides across states, national parks, cities, road trips, transportation, car rental, insurance, and trip planning.
Nothing here is written from memory and nothing is a rewrite of someone else’s article. Every guide follows one set of rules: how a topic gets picked, where each number comes from, where the photos come from, and who checks the result before it goes live. Those rules are below.
Who makes this guide
USA Guidebook is produced by an independent travel publisher who reads every guide against its sources before it goes live. The editor is A. Kobtsev, the name that stands in the footer of every page. There’s no staff of local experts behind the byline and no claim of years spent living in the States: the guide’s credibility rests on where each number comes from, not on who we say we are.
The site is one of twelve country guides the same publisher runs on a shared editorial system, so the checking rules, the photo policy, and the automated pre-publication tests are the same for all of them. What differs is the material: the sources for this guide are American operators and agencies, and the register is American English.
How topics are chosen
A topic gets in because travelers search for it before a trip, not because it sounded nice to write. We look at what people from the UK, Canada, Australia, and Europe ask when they plan a US trip: entry rules and ESTA, which airport to fly into, rental cars and one-way fees, park passes and timed-entry reservations, how many days a route needs. Search demand sets the order, which is why the states most international visitors fly into came first.
When a guide names a specific place to eat or stay, it has to be well regarded in several independent sources, and the guide says why it was picked. We do not reprint anyone’s star ratings or review counts: those belong to the platforms that collected them. A single glowing listing with silence everywhere else isn’t a consensus, and the place stays out.
How every number is checked
Every price, fee, schedule, distance, and date in a guide has a paper trail. The number is traced back to the page of the organization that sets it, that page’s address goes into the guide’s source list with the date we read it, and the wording we relied on is quoted there so the check can be repeated later. An automated test runs before each publication and fails the build if a number in the text has no matching source entry.
Aggregators, booking marketplaces, and other travel blogs aren’t sources for us; they’re where numbers go stale. For this guide the sources are mostly nps.gov for park fees, hours, and seasonal road closures, recreation.gov for camping and timed-entry reservations, amtrak.com for train routes and fares, mta.info for New York transit fares, and cbp.gov for what happens at the border. Prices still drift between checks, so the date on each guide tells you how fresh the numbers are, and the payment page always has the final word.
Photos and sources
Photos come from Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons or public domain licenses. Each photo carries the author, the license, and a link to the original in its caption, so credit goes to the photographer and the license terms can be checked in one click.
No frame is reused under a different name across guides: a test compares the image files and blocks the build if one is. Text gets the same treatment, with guides checked against each other for duplicated passages before publication, so two guides on neighboring topics do not tell you the same thing twice.
How the guide is made
Research and first drafts are done with AI tools. An editor sets the brief, directs the work, reads the finished text against the source pages, and decides what goes live. The date printed on each guide is the day that reading happened; if a source cannot be found for a number, the number does not stay in the text.
Some links on the site are affiliate links: car rental, accommodation, tours, insurance. If you follow such a link and book something, we get a small commission from the service; the price for you stays the same, and the project is funded that way. Partnership does not affect what gets recommended: if the honest answer is a free shuttle or a walk instead of a paid tour, that’s what the guide says.