We want you to know exactly how The EC Guide makes money, so here it is in plain language.
The short version
Some links on this page are booking links. If you book a tour, activity, or stay through them, The EC Guide earns a commission at no extra cost to you. Our recommendations are our own.
You’ll see that same notice near the top of any page on our site that includes booking links.
What a booking link is
A booking link takes you to a partner’s website where you can reserve a tour, activity, charter, rental or place to stay. We work with booking partners such as TripShock, and we may add others over time.
When you click one of these links and complete a booking, the partner pays us a small commission. The price you pay is the same as if you had gone to the partner’s site directly. You never pay extra because you came from us.
Where you’ll find them
Booking links mostly appear on business listing pages, often as a “Book” button. They may also appear in stories, area guides or other pages. Any page that includes booking links carries the notice above, and on longer pages we repeat a short label next to links further down, such as “(booking link, we earn a commission).”
Commissions don’t choose our recommendations
Commissions help keep The EC Guide free to read and free for local businesses to be listed. They never decide what we list, what we recommend or what we say about a place.
- We only recommend what we would recommend without a commission.
- A business doesn’t need a booking link to appear in the guide or in a story.
- We don’t rank places higher because they pay us more.
- When we haven’t personally tried a tour or activity, we say so.
- Prices, when we show them, are total prices that we’ve checked recently. Always confirm the final price on the booking page.
Our full editorial standards are on our How We Choose Places page.
A note for the technically curious
Every booking link on our site is marked with a rel="sponsored" attribute in the page code. That’s the standard way of telling search engines like Google that a link is part of a commercial relationship, so it doesn’t count as an independent editorial endorsement.
Paid placements
Separate from booking links, businesses can pay for optional Featured or Homepage Spotlight placements. Those are always labeled as advertising and never affect our editorial picks.
Hosted experiences
Sometimes businesses offer free meals, tours or stays to writers. We haven’t accepted any so far. If we ever do, the story will say so clearly near the top, with a line such as “Example Charters hosted us,” so you can weigh our opinion with that in mind.
Questions
If you have questions about any link on our site, please contact us.