What this is
Smart Self-Managed Tours helps first-time city visitors save time discovering important places. City, district and place pages explain what each stop contributes; the planner turns that knowledge into days with recorded visit duration, travel time, breaks and opening hours.
It is built for travellers who want a useful answer rather than an impressive-sounding guess. The site shows when a duration is approximate, leaves unsupported facts out, and says when a city does not contain enough suitable places to fill the time requested.
Where the data comes from
Places, coordinates, categories and much of the opening-hours data begin with OpenStreetMap. Wikidata supplies multilingual identities and structured context; Wikipedia and Wikivoyage provide evidence for notability and editorial research. Rankings combine recorded signals with reviewed editorial research, and editorial decisions remain explicit rather than pretending to be raw data.
- OpenStreetMap
- Places, coordinates, categories, opening hours and administrative district boundaries. ODbL.
- Wikidata
- Multilingual identities, descriptions, heritage status and coordinates used to verify matches. CC0.
- Wikipedia
- Sitelinks and pageview evidence used as recorded signals, alongside reviewed editorial rankings.
- Wikivoyage
- Research material for editorial sections; claims are checked and reviewed before publication.
What is deliberately absent: prices. Open data carries no reliable price level, so there is no budget filter — a "cheap" toggle with nothing behind it would mislead more than it helps. It returns when a real price source is ingested.
How the planner shapes your day
The planner scores suitable candidates, groups them geographically, orders a practical route and schedules it against recorded opening hours and the traveller’s day window. The same inputs produce the same plan.
That repeatability makes the result testable. Two rules are non-negotiable: no stop is scheduled while its venue is closed, and no day exceeds its available window after visits, travel and breaks are added together.
- The site founder reads the guides and requests factual corrections.
- Travel times come from a routing engine rather than invented estimates.
- Category-default visit durations are visibly marked as approximate.
Coverage, honestly
The guide now covers 110 published cities across 56 countries. Breadth is not presented as equal depth: every destination has a usable foundation, while guides, practical facts and images continue to become richer over time.
All eleven interface and content languages are published: English, German, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Portuguese and Arabic. Coverage still varies by place; missing local content falls back transparently instead of being disguised as a complete translation.
How it pays for itself
The business model is advertising, not influence. There are no affiliate booking links, paid ranking positions or sponsored places presented as recommendations. Advertising space is separated from editorial content and reserves its layout so loading an ad does not move the page.
- Money never changes a place's ranking or a planner result.
- The print view of an itinerary carries no advertising at all.
- Full detail is on the advertising disclosure page.
Why this is a pseudonym
This pseudonym is a privacy-preserving editorial identity within SSMTour. It lets the reviewer remain private while SSMTour retains editorial accountability.
SSMTour remains accountable for the published page, the review record and corrections made after publication.
Editorial responsibility: Elena Voss