Day Trips from Zurich is run by Jonathan Lao. Our new and revised guides are researched and drafted with the help of AI tools. Every price, timetable and opening hour in them is checked against the official source — SBB, ZVV, MeteoSwiss or the operator — and carries the month we checked it. AI images in them are labelled.
Who is behind the guides?
Jonathan Lao runs Day Trips from Zurich and owns the Swiss web agency PortalWeb GmbH. He decides which guides we write and when they go online. The research and the drafts are done with AI tools, and the next sections explain how we check them. We don't make up visits: a new or revised guide never says "when we were there" about a trip that didn't happen. What you get instead is data you can check yourself — fares looked up for a specific date, walking times measured on the map, climate figures from MeteoSwiss.
Where do the facts come from?
From the people who run things, not from other travel blogs. We check:
- Trains, buses and boats against the SBB timetable and the ZVV and operator fare tables.
- Weather and climate against MeteoSwiss, the Swiss federal weather service: its official 1991–2020 climate normals, or our own averages from its station readings, with the years named.
- Opening hours and ticket prices against the attraction's own website.
- Events and markets against the organiser's website or the City of Zurich.
In new and revised guides, every price and timetable says when we last checked it, for example "checked November 2026". Swiss public transport changes its timetable every December, so that's when we re-check fares and journey times. Guides written before November 2026 get the same checks when we revise them.
How do we use AI?
AI tools search the sources, sort what they find, write the drafts and help us build the maps and charts. Google's guidance on generative AI allows this, as long as the result helps the people reading it. What AI doesn't do is decide what's true. Language models produce numbers that sound right and aren't, so every figure, date and price is looked up in the primary source itself — the SBB timetable, the operator's price list — and never taken from a model's memory or another blog. That includes titles, descriptions and image captions. We don't publish pages in bulk, and we don't write a separate page for every search phrase.
How are the images, maps and charts made?
- AI-generated images in new and revised guides carry the caption "AI-generated image" and the standard IPTC label for AI images in the file itself. They show the mood of a place or season, never a specific scene that we claim happened.
- Maps are drawn by us from OpenStreetMap data (© OpenStreetMap contributors).
- Charts and timetables are drawn by us from the official figures named on each graphic.
When does the "Updated" date change?
Only when the content changes in a way that matters to you: new prices, new dates, a rewritten section. Fixing a typo or a broken link doesn't count, so it doesn't move the date. Our most-read guides are reviewed every three months, and prices after every December timetable change.
Tours and affiliate links
Some guides link to guided day tours on GetYourGuide. We're a GetYourGuide partner: if you book through one of these links, we earn a commission, and you pay the same price. Those links are marked as sponsored in the page code. A commission never decides whether we recommend a tour. The day-trip table on the homepage lists the train fare for every trip, so you can compare it with the tour.
Found a mistake?
Prices and timetables change. If something in a guide is out of date or wrong, write to info@daytripsfromzurich.com — we check it against the source and correct the guide. You can also reach us through the contact page.