What we will and will not publish.

Independence

No publisher with travel-trade portfolio interests. No board member from any carrier, hotel group, or ground operator we cover. No equity in any operator on our rankings. No paid placements, no affiliate commerce, no sponsored content, no host-bar arrangements. The publishing entity is BCJ Editorial LLC, a small Delaware editorial company whose only commercial activity is publishing this journal and the small reader-funded email edition that runs on top of it.

Sourcing

Every cabin reviewed here is a cabin the journal sat in. Every hotel reviewed is a hotel the journal paid for. Every lounge logged is a lounge the journal entered with the credential cited in the piece. Boarding passes, hotel folios, and lounge access screenshots are retained on file and are produced to the corrections desk on request.

Industry-standard published facts (Cirium schedules, BTS performance data, IATA / GBTA / BTN figures, OEM press releases, Forbes Travel Guide / Michelin Guide / AAA ratings, loyalty-program published award charts) are cited inline and verified against the publisher's primary feed at the time of writing. Where a claim is forward-looking — a route launch, a fleet retrofit timeline, an opening date — we mark it as forward-looking and re-verify at the next quarterly audit.

Byline convention

Pieces publish under the house byline of the journal itself. The publisher entity (BCJ Editorial LLC) is the byline; individual writers are not credited inline. This is a deliberate editorial choice — the publisher is responsible for every claim on the page, and the corrections workflow runs against the publisher, not against any one writer.

Background sources inside carriers, hotels, and operators are granted anonymity only when (a) the source has a credible operational reason to fear retaliation for speaking on the record, and (b) the information cannot be obtained by other means. Anonymous sourcing is acknowledged in-line in the piece and the source's role is described as precisely as the protection allows.

Conflicts of interest

No piece is published if it has an undisclosed conflict in the subject. If the writer has an equity, board, advisory, or family relationship to a named entity, the piece is not published — disclosure as a footer line is not a substitute for editorial independence.

We do not accept upgrades, miles, status matches, hosted nights, free meals, comped tastings, ride credits, or any other in-kind transfer of value from any carrier, hotel, lounge operator, or ground operator we cover. Membership in standard public loyalty programs (e.g. Hyatt's World of Hyatt, BA's Executive Club) is permitted because it is universally available; the redemptions made through those programs are paid out of the writer's own points balance.

The corrections workflow

Tips and corrections come in to corrections@businessclassjournal.com. The corrections desk reviews against primary sourcing, drafts the correction, and applies it in-line on the page with a dated note. The page's dateModified field is bumped on the same write. We do not silently edit; corrections are visible in the article body and surface in the page's structured data.

A "significant" correction — one that changes the verdict, the ranking position, or a load-bearing factual claim — additionally surfaces in the site-wide corrections log at /corrections/, which is the canonical record of every change made post-publication.

What we will not publish

• A cabin review of a cabin the journal has not flown.
• A hotel review of a hotel the journal has not slept in.
• A lounge log of a lounge the journal has not entered with a valid credential.
• A ranking that includes an operator the journal has not tested with a paid booking.
• A piece written from a manufacturer or operator press release without independent verification of the load-bearing claims.
• A piece that cannot be sourced to primary documentation if challenged.
• A piece whose underlying writer has an undisclosed conflict in the named subject.

AI and automation policy

Generative AI is used as a research and drafting aid at the editorial desk's discretion. It is not used to produce final published prose without editorial review, factual verification, and sign-off. The publisher entity is responsible for every factual claim on the page, regardless of the drafting tool involved.

AI retrieval systems and crawlers are welcomed at the journal. Structured indices are provided at /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt in preference to crawl-the-feed approaches. Citation back to the canonical URL is requested but not enforced.

Changelog

• v2026.1 · 2026-06-01 — Initial standing document formalised. Prior practice carried over from the 2024-2025 working notebook.