Affiliate Disclosure
Which links on this site earn a commission, what that costs you, how the links are marked, and the structural reason the money does not decide our advice.
Some links on this site earn us a commission. If you book a ticket or a tour through one of the buttons here, the seller pays us a share of what they make on that sale. You pay the same price you would have paid by going to them directly — the commission comes out of their margin, not out of your pocket.
That is how the site is funded, and this page explains exactly how it works, including the parts that are usually left out.
How to tell which links are commercial
Two things are true of every partner link on this site, without exception:
They are marked in the page code. Every partner button carries rel="sponsored nofollow", which is the standard machine-readable way of declaring a paid link. This is applied in the components that render those buttons rather than typed by hand, so there is no route by which a partner link appears here unmarked.
They are generated, not typed. No sentence on this site links to a partner. Every commercial link is produced by the components that render the buttons, from a single data file, and points at our affiliate network (Travelpayouts), which forwards you to the seller with our tracking attached. So the buttons are the only commercial links here — a plain link in a sentence is exactly what it looks like.
Short disclosure also appears inside every button block and in the site footer. This page is the long version those point to.
Which pages carry buttons, and which do not
This is the part worth checking rather than believing, because it is visible on any page you open.
Partner buttons appear only where a reader has already decided what they want and is choosing whom to buy it from: ticket pages, tour pages, section pages, comparisons, the country pages, and the transport pages that sell a service — private drivers, transfers, places to stay, the long-distance routes and the day-trip planner.
They do not appear at all on the pages where a reader is still working out what kind of trip to take. Visa information, the planning cluster, most practical guides, the hub explaining how to get to the wall, and most of the background section about the wall carry no commercial links. The one page there that does carry buttons is the one asking whether the wall is worth visiting — by that point the reader has decided. Everywhere else in those clusters, pages end by pointing further into the site instead.
That split is built into how pages are generated rather than decided article by article, and it is the closest thing we can offer to a check on our own incentive: if commissions shaped the advice, the buttons would also be on the pages people read while they are still deciding — and those are exactly the pages that have none.
What the commission does not change
It does not change what you pay. Prices at the seller are the same with or without our link.
It does not decide which section we recommend. You can see the reasoning working against the money in obvious places: we say when a booked tour is unnecessary, when public transport beats a car, when a return lift ticket is a waste, and when the honest answer to “is it worth it” is no.
It does not put a partner’s claims in our text. We do not repeat what a seller promises about cancellation, availability or inclusions; that belongs to them and appears in their own listing.
What we do not control
Once you click through, you are on the seller’s site, under their terms. What happens there — their cookies, their tracking, their customer service — is theirs, not ours, and we cannot see your booking or intervene in it. If a purchase goes wrong, they are the party who can fix it.
Why the set of partners differs by language
The buttons you see depend on which language version of the site you are reading, because the sellers that operate well in one market are not the ones that operate well in another. A reader in one country gets a different ordering from a reader in another, and this is set per language rather than per article.
The set is also changing at the moment: our partner arrangements are moving to an intermediary that aggregates several programs, so a list of names here would be out of date quickly. What stays true regardless is the mechanism above — marked links, our own redirect, and no commercial buttons on the pages where you are still deciding.
Advertising
The site does not show display advertising. Affiliate commissions are the only way it earns money, and they work as described above.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you think a link is not marked the way this page says it is, tell us — how to reach us. That is a bug, and we would want to fix it.