Data coverage

What we know, and what we do not

This page exists because “we do not know” is a real answer, and most travel sites will not give it.

This page exists because "we do not know" is a real answer and most travel sites will not give it. Here is exactly what BEST can see and where it stops.

What we know well

  • Where things are. The national register holds around 340 points of interest with accurate coordinates.
  • Weather, per coordinate rather than per country, from MET Norway.
  • Population by settlement, monthly, from Hagstova Føroya.
  • Bus stops inside Tórshavn municipality, with route numbers and stop names.

What we know partially

  • Restaurants and cafés. The national register lists nine restaurants for the whole country and has no café category at all. OpenStreetMap fills much of the gap, but coverage varies by village.
  • Bus stops outside Tórshavn, which come from OpenStreetMap rather than an official source.
  • Supermarkets, which the register files under a generic "shop" type — we identify them by chain name.

What we do not know at all

We do not know: Bus and ferry departure times

Strandfaraskip Landsins publishes timetables as web pages, not as a machine-readable feed. We can tell you a stop exists; we cannot tell you when the bus comes.

We do not know: Opening hours

No Faroese source publishes these in a form we can read. Whether a restaurant is open on a Tuesday in February is not something we can answer.

We do not know: Live disruption

We have no feed for ferry cancellations, road closures or tunnel maintenance.

We do not know: Accessibility at individual properties

No data exists. We will not guess about something that determines whether a trip is possible.

How this shows up in the product

Every place BEST reports on carries a confidence level. "Nothing recorded" means every source answered and found nothing. "Could not be checked" means a source failed and the answer is unknown. Those are different, and we never collapse the second into the first.

Straight-line distances are exactly that. We have no routing engine, so we never present a walking time as though it followed roads.

How this shows up when you are choosing a stay.

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