The Starlane Method™
The rules every Starlane Report lives by. Where the numbers come from, how they get checked, and why you never have to take my word for anything.
This started with a simple frustration.
I kept reading numbers about the parks that nobody could check. Prices with no source. Trends with no data behind them. So I started collecting the numbers myself and writing down exactly where each one came from.
Then I wrote down the rules I wished everyone publishing numbers would follow, and I hold every Starlane Report to them. Here they are.
The rules
- 01
Every number is dated. You can see when it was true.
- 02
Public sources only. Every source is listed and linked.
- 03
Deterministic where possible. The same input always produces the same number, with no manual rekeying and no estimation.
- 04
We respect robots rules and do not drive quote calculators.
- 05
Our own businesses get the same treatment as everyone else's, and our ownership is documented in the same public records.
- 06
Corrections are invited and land in the next snapshot, credited.
Confidence
The Starlane Confidence Scale
Every sourced claim in a report wears a tier, so you always know what kind of evidence stands behind it.
Matched to a government or official registry record we retrieved ourselves.
Reported by an independent outlet we link to.
The company's own statements, filings it published, or its BBB profile.
Sourced from forums or social threads, linked, treated as sentiment rather than fact.
Arithmetic on two figures the same operator published for the same stay, with the work shown beside the result.
A claim carries the tier of its weakest necessary source, and draft tiers are never published.
The tiers describe the kind of source, not a universal ranking. For what a company says its own policy is, the company's own document is the strongest source there is.
Named metrics
The Broker's Cut
The Broker's Cut is what the middle takes in a DVC point rental: the renter price minus the owner payout on the same rental, per point.
New metrics get named and defined here before they appear in a report, and the definitions never move.
Cadence, corrections, and reuse
Every report runs on a dated snapshot. Some topics get measured quarterly, others yearly, whatever the data honestly supports. The data date is stamped on every figure and every download, so you can always see exactly when a number was true.
If something here is wrong, tell me where you found the right answer. The fix lands in the next edition and you get credited for catching it.
Everything is released under CC BY 4.0. Use it, chart it, quote it. Cite Michael Starlane when you do.
The line
We publish what a reader needs to trust a number. We do not publish what a competitor needs to reproduce the pipeline. Verification is owed to readers. Replication is not.
The collection and synthesis systems behind Starlane Reports are proprietary. The parsers, weightings, prompts, and pipelines stay in house. The sources, definitions, and rules above do not. That split is deliberate: you should be able to check every number without us, and no one should be able to skip the work by copying ours.
See the method at work