A few links on this site can earn money. You should know which ones, and you should know what nobody around here gets to buy.
Affiliate Links
The hotel pages and the booking section carry affiliate links. Follow one, book something, and the company on the other end pays a commission. What you pay stays exactly the same—the commission comes off the company’s side, not out of your pocket. That is the whole mechanism, and it is how a good chunk of the travel web keeps the lights on.
Spotting them is easy enough. They leave this site and drop you on a booking platform.
What A Commission Does Not Buy
No hotel or tourist office pays for the way it gets described here.
When a page tells you to give a place three hours instead of one, that is the honest estimate. When a page tells you to skip something, it stays in, commission or no commission. A recommendation you can buy is worth nothing to you, and it would be worth nothing to me either.
Paid Listings
Businesses can buy a listing on this site. The offer sits on the partner page, out in the open for anyone to read. Anything paid for gets labeled as paid, right where you run into it. Paid placement never gets quietly folded into a regular article.
Donations
Some readers send money through the donation page. That is a gift, and it gets treated as one. It buys no coverage and no link.
The Rules Behind All This
Two sets of rules apply, and they happen to agree with each other. For readers in the United States, the Federal Trade Commission wants affiliate relationships disclosed in plain language. Here in Germany, where this site is run from, the law wants anything commercial to be recognizable as commercial. Neither one is hard to satisfy. You say it out loud, which is what this page does.
And if you ever land on a page here and cannot tell whether something was paid for, that is a mistake on my end, not a judgment call on yours. Tell me on the contact page and I will fix the page.