Data sources
Every fact on this site is either traceable to an official source or labelled with where it came from and when it was last checked. This page lists them all in one place, because "trust us" is not a source.
Entry requirements, visas and arrival cards
Source: the destination's own immigration or foreign affairs authority first, Smartraveller (the Australian Government's travel advice service) second, and the destination's embassy in Australia third. Every destination page links the exact sources it used.
How often: an automated job re-reads every cited government page daily and compares what it says about durations, fees and visa status against the previous read. If nothing changed, the page's review date moves - because the source was genuinely re-read that day. If something changed, a person confirms it against the source before anything on the site moves. The full process is in the editorial policy.
Exchange rates
Source: the Frankfurter API, which serves the European Central Bank's published reference rates, with ExchangeRate-API as a fallback for currencies the ECB does not publish.
How often: checked weekly and updated when the rate has genuinely moved. Rates on this site are deliberately shown as approximate ("1 AUD ≈ ...") - they exist to give you a feel for what your dollar buys, not to settle a transfer. Your bank or card sets the rate that actually applies.
Travel statistics - where Australians go
Source: the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Overseas Arrivals and Departures, read directly from the ABS Data API. We use one series from it: short-term resident returns by country of main destination, original (not seasonally adjusted). ABS material is used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.
How often: re-read monthly, a few days after the ABS publishes. Figures are only shown for complete twelve-month periods, so nothing is ever compared against a part-year. The ABS revises recent months as late records are processed, and our figures move with those revisions rather than freezing at first publication.
What the numbers mean: they count trips, not people, so one traveller taking three trips appears three times. Each trip is attributed to the single country nominated as its main destination, so a stopover is not counted separately. Trips are recorded as travellers arrive home, which puts a December holiday in the January figures. Comparisons run against 2018-19, the last complete financial year before the pandemic, because the years after it were shaped by closed borders rather than by choice. All of this is stated on the statistics pages themselves.
Flight delays - which flights actually go
Source: the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics, which requires every Australian domestic airline to report each month how many flights it scheduled on each route, how many operated, and how many left and arrived within 15 minutes of schedule. Australian airports also report international traffic by city pair. Both are read as CSV from data.gov.au and used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia licence.
How often: re-read monthly. BITRE publishes a new month roughly five weeks after it ends and occasionally revises an earlier one; our figures move with those revisions.
What the numbers mean: a cancellation rate is cancellations divided by flights scheduled, and an on-time rate is on-time departures divided by flights flown, because a flight that was cancelled cannot also have left late. Each direction is a separate flight with a separate record. BITRE names the busier city pairs individually and rolls the rest into a national total, so the route pages cover most of Australian domestic flying rather than all of it, and each one says so.
Product prices - eSIMs, travel cards, insurance, activities
Source: each provider's own published pricing. Where a live connection to the provider's API is configured (Airalo for eSIM plans, Wise for card pricing), prices refresh daily from that API and are marked accordingly. Everything else is labelled indicative, carries the date it was last confirmed, and is re-checked on a rolling basis - the provider's checkout is always the price that applies.
Insurance premiums are indicative for the traveller and trip stated beneath each table; the Product Disclosure Statement for the specific policy is the binding document.
Carry-on and dangerous goods rules
Source: TravelSECURE (Department of Home Affairs), CASA for battery and dangerous-goods rules, and airline dangerous-goods pages where airlines are stricter than the government baseline. Each item on the carry-on rules page links its specific source.
Passport validity rules
Source: each destination government's stated requirement, held as structured data so the passport checker computes from the sourced rule rather than a rule of thumb. Reviewed on the same daily cycle as entry requirements.
Medication rules
Source: Australian Government guidance (Services Australia for PBS export rules, Smartraveller for destination guidance) and destination authorities - the Australian Embassy in Tokyo for Japan, the UAE Ministry of Health, Singapore's Health Sciences Authority. Every claim in the medication guide links its source.
Plugs, voltages and driving permits
Plug types and voltages come from the international electrotechnical standards data for each country. International Driving Permit rules come from the Australian motoring clubs that issue them and each destination's road authority.
When a source and this site disagree
The source wins, always - and we want to know. If you spot a difference between what this site says and what an official source says, tell us and it will be checked against the source and corrected. The editorial policy describes how corrections are handled.
Last updated 2026-09-06.