Totally İstanbul is an independent travel index for one of the world's genuinely great cities — built, deliberately, as an index rather than a blog. That distinction matters to how we've approached it: instead of a stream of dated posts, the site is organised into departments (Plan, Stay, Places, Do, Culture, Food) that are meant to stay useful and current for a long time, plus a News department specifically for the things that actually change.
Why start small
We launched with a deliberately limited set of pages rather than a rushed, thin attempt to cover everything at once. A smaller number of properly researched, well-structured guides is more useful than a much larger number of shallow ones — and it's honest about where the site currently is. The plan is to keep adding real, checked pages on a regular cadence, expanding each department's coverage without changing how the site is organised.
What we're not
We're not affiliated with any tourism board, hotel chain, or tour operator, and we don't accept payment for favourable placement. Where we mention a category of business (a style of hotel, a type of restaurant), it reflects genuine editorial judgement about what's useful to know, not a paid listing.
How facts are handled
Istanbul travel information splits roughly into two categories: things that are stable for years (a mosque's history, how a neighbourhood is laid out) and things that change often (visa rules, transit fares, exchange rates). We try to be honest about which is which — see our News department for how we handle the fast-moving category, rather than letting it quietly go stale inside an evergreen guide.
Where this is headed
The long-term goal is genuine, comprehensive coverage of the city — every neighbourhood, every major sight, deep guides to food, day trips beyond the city, and practical information for different kinds of travellers (families, accessibility, solo travellers, longer stays). We're also building toward translated editions in multiple languages, rolled out as each is properly localised rather than machine-translated wholesale. See our FAQ for more on both.
The goal isn't to be the biggest Istanbul site. It's to be the one that's still accurate and still useful two years from now, because we built it to be maintained, not just published.
