The Bosphorus Edit
Why we built this magazine, what we mean by a daycation, and the rules we set ourselves before we wrote a word about a single hotel.
It is a Tuesday in late September, just after three. The pool at Çırağan Palace Kempinski is almost empty — a Belgian couple at the far end, a woman in a wide hat with a paperback, a waiter carrying a single iced coffee on a tray. The Bosphorus is doing the silver-blue thing it does in early autumn, and a tanker the size of a small town is sliding past on its way to Odessa. Nobody is checking in. Most of the people here will be home for dinner.
This is the unit of experience this magazine is built around. A weekday afternoon, a hotel that is not your own, a pool or a hammam or a quiet bar at the back of a lobby that has nothing to do with the rest of your life. In Istanbul there are perhaps two hundred of these afternoons available on any given day, scattered across the European bank and the Asian one, and almost no one is writing about them with the care they deserve.
We are. That is the whole project.
What we mean when we say daycation
The word is awkward. We know. We have spent a year trying to find a better one and have not. What we mean by it is precise: a paid, scheduled, finite use of a hotel’s daytime amenities by someone who is not staying the night. A day pass at the Mandarin Oriental Bosphorus pool. A four-hour hammam session at the Çırağan. A weekday lunch and a lounger at Sumahan-on-the-Water, on the Asian side, with the ferries pulling in below. A swim at Soho House Istanbul if you know someone who can sign you in, or the rooftop at The Marmara Pera if you don’t.
It is not a staycation, which is a vacation taken at home. It is not a hotel review in the traditional sense, because nobody is sleeping there. It is something quieter and, we’d argue, more useful: a way to take the city’s best rooms for a walk without committing to a night you don’t need.
What this magazine is, and what it isn’t
We are a magazine, not a booking engine. We have opinions. We arrange them under headlines. We write deks and we test things and we publish photographs we have taken ourselves where we can. The structural model is the front-of-book of a serious travel monthly — The Bosphorus Edit, On the Water, the numbered series on neighborhoods — rather than the algorithm-driven listicle. We will rank things. We will rank them slowly.
We do not chase news. We will not be first to a hotel opening. We will not write the breathless preview pegged to a press release. When a property is new, we will wait until the staff have learned the room and the chef has stopped changing the menu, and then we will go and sit by the pool for an afternoon and report back.
The rules we wrote down before we started
There are four, and they are the entire ethics policy:
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We test what we recommend, where we can. A “we visited” claim in our prose means an editor was actually there with a credit card and a notebook. For hotels we have not yet been to — and there are many; the catalog will outrun our diaries for years — we say so plainly: the rooftop is reported to, the day pass includes, never we found that.
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We accept hospitality. We never accept coverage in exchange. Hotels sometimes comp a day pass or a meal. We accept these the way any working magazine does, on the condition that nothing about the resulting piece is negotiated. If a property asks to see copy before publication, the answer is no, and the conversation usually ends there.
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Affiliate links pay the rent, transparently. Where we link to a booking platform, we may earn a small commission if you book. It does not change the price you pay. It does not change which hotels we cover or how we rank them. It is what keeps the magazine independent of the hotels themselves, which is the only arrangement we trust.
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We correct the record in public. When we get something wrong — a price, an hour, an amenity, a sentence we shouldn’t have written — we fix it on the page and note the correction at the bottom. We would rather be slow and right than quick and approximately accurate.
What’s coming
Over the next months we will publish, in roughly this order: a ranked list of the seven best Bosphorus pools, west-bank only; a long photo essay on the Asian-side hotels nobody writes about; a numbered serial on neighborhoods (Beşiktaş, Beyoğlu, Karaköy, Kanlıca, Moda) with day-use itineraries for each; a short directory of hammams that accept walk-ins; and one quiet, opinionated piece on why the rooftop bar has eaten the rooftop pool, and what we propose to do about it.
We are starting on the European bank because that is where we live. We will not stay there.
If you are an editor, a hotelier, a reader who has found a place we should know about, or someone who wants to argue with our rankings: we read every email. The address is on the about page. We answer slowly, but we answer.
— The Editors
