How the guide ranks, prices and pictures its shops
Every list in this guide is ordered the same way, and every price carries its source. Here is the working.
What goes in
358 shops, each traced through public sources: the shop's own website and rate card, its Google Maps listing and its Google reviews. Nobody visits, tests or books a session for the guide. It reads what is published and says where it read it.
The order of a list
The score starts with the shop's Google rating, smoothed by the number of reviews behind it. That is a Bayesian-style average: a rating with few reviews gets pulled towards the middle until enough people agree with it. So a 5.0 from three reviews doesn't outrank a 4.6 from 400.
Small bonuses then go to shops that publish a rate card, have a website and list their opening hours, the things that let you decide before you leave the hotel. A few featured shops are placed near the top of lists, and every list that does this says so on the page. There are no paid placements.
Where the prices come from
First choice is the shop's own published rate card. Where there isn't one, the price may come from another directory or from a thaiolddriver field report, and the page names which. Where nothing is published at all, some pages carry prices Google reviewers say they paid. Those are labelled as reported, not listed, and they are not a menu. Prices move in this city. Treat every figure as a guide and confirm it at the door.
Photos
Shop photos come from the shops' own Google Maps listings and websites, and each page credits them. When a page shows a district instead, the photo is labelled as the district, not the shop.
Reviews
Some Google reviews are fake or written by staff, so a page only says reviewers mention something when several of them do. One glowing line doesn't make a pattern.
Something wrong?
Email hello@bangkokhappyending.com. Corrections and removals are free; shop owners will find the details on the owners' page. The results of all this are on every shop in Bangkok and the street map.