What an affiliate link is
Some of the links on this site, the ones that send you to book a tour or a place to stay, are affiliate links. They carry a small tag that tells the booking site you arrived from Sri Lanka Frontier. If you go on to book, we are paid a commission by that company. The tag does nothing else: it does not track you around the web on our behalf, and it changes nothing about the page you are reading.
Who we partner with
Two programmes cover almost everything we link to. Viator, part of Tripadvisor, handles the tours, day trips and experiences, the Yala safaris, the Kandy temple tours, the whale-watching trips. Booking.com handles the places to stay. When we point you to a tour or a hotel, it is through one of these, and the commission comes out of the company’s margin, not your pocket.
What it costs you
Nothing. You pay the same price you would pay going direct; the commission is the booking platform’s way of thanking the site that sent you. There is no markup, no surcharge and no worse deal for using our links. If anything, we would rather you booked through us so the guide keeps paying for itself, but that is the extent of the pressure you will get.
What it does not change
This is the part that matters. The money does not buy its way onto the page. The tours we surface are ordered by real traveller review volume and rating from the Viator marketplace, not by which one pays us the most. A hotel does not get a warmer write-up for being bookable, and a place does not get mentioned just because there is a commission attached. If the honest answer is that something is overrated or not worth it, that is what you will read. Our full standards are set out in our editorial guidelines.
Why we spell this out
Advertising rules on both sides of the Atlantic, the FTC in the United States, the ASA and CMA in the UK, ask sites to disclose paid relationships clearly, and we think you deserve to know regardless of what the rules say. A recommendation is worth more when you can see where the money comes from.
A note on prices
Where we mention prices we give ranges, because Portuguese prices move with the season and the exchange rate. The figures on the tour cards, though, come live from Viator and show the current price at the moment you look, so what you see is what you would pay.
Anything unclear, or want to check something? Get in touch, we are happy to explain.