Who runs Counterwise

Why Counterwise exists

I started Counterwise after one too many bad surprises at a car rental counter. Booking sites are good at comparing prices, but they tell you very little about the desk you will actually stand at: whether it takes your debit card, how big the deposit is, whether the staff will push extra insurance, or how long the shuttle takes.

The same brand can be excellent at one airport and poor at the next, because each counter has its own staff, its own rules and sometimes its own franchise owner. So Counterwise rates every desk on its own, from what travellers report about that exact counter.

Who does what

• Me (Miguel L.): I founded Counterwise and I am its editor. I set how desks are scored, read every summary and every red and green flag before it is published, and hold back any desk whose wording I am not yet sure of.
• Our data pipeline collects recent public traveller reviews, removes unreliable ones, and has an AI model draft the sub-scores and summaries. Code rules check every draft before the editor sees it.

The full process, including the score weights and how reviews are cleaned, is in our methodology.

Independence

No rental company or booking site can pay for a score, a ranking or a place on our lists, or to remove a red flag. Read our independence policy and how we make money in the affiliate disclosure.

Privacy

We count anonymous page views with Cloudflare Web Analytics: no cookies, no personal data, and no tracking across other websites. If you follow an affiliate link, the partner's own website may set its own cookies to record the booking (see our affiliate disclosure).

Contact and corrections

Write to hello@counterwise.eu.

• Travellers: tell us if a desk has moved, changed its rules, or if anything on a page is wrong or out of date.
• Rental companies: send factual corrections (location, opening hours, deposits, card rules), ideally with a source. We check them and fix confirmed errors. We do not change scores or remove red flags on request: they reflect what travellers report.
• Journalists and researchers: figures from our airport pages and reports are free to quote with a link. Each airport report has a "How to cite" section, and we are happy to answer questions about the data.