Editorial Standards

1. Editorial independence

ResortGolfer accepts no payment, gift, or consideration of any kind in exchange for editorial coverage, review scores, rankings, or placement.

We do not preview, share, or modify editorial work in response to commercial pressure from manufacturers, courses, resorts, or governing bodies.

When a piece touches a topic where any contributor has a financial or personal interest, that interest is disclosed in the byline area of the article.

2. Sourcing

Primary sources are preferred: the USGA and R&A Rules of Golf for rules content; manufacturer technical documentation for equipment claims; peer-reviewed research for biomechanics and analytics; and direct on-course or on-launch-monitor testing for product reviews.

Secondary sources are clearly labeled. We do not present aggregated reporting as our own.

Statistical claims — strokes gained figures, distance benchmarks, handicap distributions — are linked or footnoted to their underlying data set.

3. Corrections

Material errors are corrected on the original article with a dated correction note appended at the bottom. The pre-correction text is preserved in the change log.

Substantive updates that change the conclusion of an article trigger an updated publication date and an editor's note explaining the change.

Typographical fixes and broken-link repairs are made silently.

4. Conflicts of interest

Editors and regular contributors disclose any equity, employment, sponsorship, or compensated relationship with manufacturers, tours, resorts, instructors, or governing bodies.

A contributor with a disclosed conflict does not write or edit any piece that touches the conflicted entity, regardless of how favorably the piece would be framed.

We do not accept free travel from resorts or tourism boards for our destination guides. Where complimentary play is required to evaluate a course, it is disclosed in the article.

5. Use of AI

ResortGolfer does not publish AI-generated analysis, instruction, or reviews under a human or organizational byline.

AI tools may be used for routine editorial support — spell-checking, formatting, code generation for our tools, or generating placeholder copy that a human then rewrites. None of these uses are surfaced to the reader as editorial work.

Schema markup, sitemaps, and metadata may be generated programmatically.

6. Sources and anonymity

We grant source anonymity sparingly and only where retaliation, contractual restriction, or safety concern is credible.

An anonymous source's role and relationship to the story is always described to the reader, even when the name is withheld.

7. Accountability

Reader complaints, correction requests, and ethics concerns are read by a human editor and answered within five business days. Submit via the contact page.

Patterns of complaint are reviewed quarterly and inform updates to this document.