Affiliate disclosure

Some of the links on tickatap earn us a commission when you buy. It never costs you more, and we never take your payment. That is the whole disclosure. The rest of this page is the detail, because a product that pitches itself on being honest about money should be able to show its working.

How the links work

Every outbound link on a plan goes through api.tickatap.com/v1/go/… before it reaches the seller. That step does two things: it records that the link was followed, and it forwards you with our tracking tag attached to the URL.

It only ever adds tracking parameters. It never rewrites where you are going and never touches a displayed price — that is a rule in the affiliate programmes’ own terms, and it is also how the code is written. When a seller has no programme we are in, the link passes through untouched and we simply earn nothing on it.

What can pay us

• Tickets — Ticketmaster and SeatGeek, through the Impact network.
• Movie tickets — Fandango and Atom.
• Tours and experiences — Viator and GetYourGuide.
• Hotels — but not as a commission. See below; it is a different arrangement and lumping it in here would be misleading.

Some of those programmes we are still applying to, so any given link may be earning nothing at all today. The disclosure stands either way: assume a buy link could pay us.

What can never pay us

Restaurants, bars, cafés, parks, murals, monuments and most landmarks. There is no commission in a mural. That is most of what a plan is made of, and we show it anyway, because it is the half that makes the day worth having.

Hotels are different

Where we show a room, we are not being paid a cut by a hotel. Our lodging supplier returns a net rate — what the room costs us — and we add a markup on top. The number you see is the net rate plus that markup, and the markup is our earnings: it is the gap between what you pay and what we pay.

As of the date on this page the markup is 5% of the net rate, which works out to about 4.8% of the price you are quoted. It is a number we set rather than one a partner set for us, so it can change; when it does, it changes here.

What this does not change

• Your price. An affiliate link costs you exactly what the same page costs anyone who found it themselves.
• What we show you. Nothing in the guide is ranked, ordered or picked by what it pays us. The commission figures live in one file, they are used for our own forecasting, and no ranking code reads them. The two categories that pay best are currently the two thinnest sections on the board, which is inconvenient and also the proof.
• Who you buy from. You buy from the seller, on their site, at their checkout. See Terms.

Why you are reading this

US advertising rules ask for a disclosure like this to be clear and obvious rather than buried at the bottom of a page nobody opens. So it is on this page in full, and in one line in the footer of every page on the site.