Rooms & Rides is free to read. Nobody pays us for a good review, and there is no subscription. Here is exactly where the money comes from.
We earn commission when you book
Our main partner is Trip.com. Links to hotels, flights, trains, car hire, transfers and attractions go there, and if you book, they pay us a percentage of what you spent. Where another company is genuinely the better answer, we link to them instead or link to nobody.
It never costs you more. The price you see is the price you’d get going direct. The commission comes out of the seller’s margin, not your wallet.
To put numbers on it, at Trip.com’s published August 2026 rates: a hotel booking pays about 5.5 percent of the stay, attraction tickets up to 8 percent, car hire and airport transfers about 5 percent, trains 2 percent, and flights about 1 percent.
That last figure is worth dwelling on. A flight is the biggest thing most people book and it pays us almost nothing. We write about flights anyway, and the passenger-rights guides carry no links at all, because someone trying to find out whether they are owed 600 euro should not be sold anything.
What that does not buy
It does not buy a recommendation. We pick what we’d book ourselves, then find the link. Not the other way round.
Two concrete commitments:
- We recommend things that pay us nothing when they are the right answer. Taking the metro instead of a paid transfer, booking direct with a hotel, skipping the insurance you do not need.
- We keep the criticism in. If a ship is loud, a hotel’s “sea view” is a car park, or a booking site’s cancellation policy is worse than its competitor’s, that goes in the review, including when we earn money from that company.
If a merchant ever asked us to soften a review, we’d say no and then write about being asked.
Where you’ll see it
Every page that carries affiliate links says so, in plain English, near the top, before you have clicked anything. Not buried in the footer, and not phrased as “this post may contain affiliate links”, which tells you nothing.
Outbound commercial links are tagged sponsored so search engines can see them for what they are.
What we don’t do
- No fake urgency. No invented countdown timers, no “4 people are looking at this right now”, no artificial scarcity. When a deal has a real expiry date we show it, and when it’s gone we mark it expired rather than leaving a clock running.
- No paid placement. You cannot buy a spot in a ranking, a “best of” list, or a review score. If we ever run genuinely sponsored content, it will be labelled as such at the top and won’t be mixed into editorial rankings.
- No sold data. We don’t sell your email address or your browsing to anyone.
- No invented prices. Every price carries the month we checked it. When we re-check, we update the date. When we haven’t, we don’t.
Why we tell you this
Partly because the law requires disclosure, and we’d rather do it properly than minimally. Mostly because the whole product here is judgement, and judgement you can’t audit is worth nothing.
If you think we have got something wrong, whether a stale price, a bad call or a conflict we have not disclosed, tell us. We publish corrections.