Affiliate disclosure
In one sentence: some of the links on this website earn me a commission, I mark them, and the commission never decides what I recommend.
What an affiliate link is
An affiliate link is a normal link with a tracking code attached. If you click it and then book a room, buy a ticket or sign up for something, the company pays me a small percentage of what you spent. You pay the same price you would have paid without the link.
How you can tell
- Every affiliate link on this site says "(affiliate link)" next to it, in words, and carries
rel="sponsored nofollow"in the HTML. - Every article that contains one says so at the top, before you start reading.
- Where an article lists several places and only some of the links earn me a commission, the note at the top says that too. Plenty of the places I write about have no affiliate programme at all, and the ones I like most are not always the ones that pay.
- Anything a company actually paid me to write is marked #ad at the top of the article.
If you ever find a link on this site that earns me money and is not marked, that is a mistake and I want to know about it: management@robertotte.com.
What I earn a commission on
- Accommodation bookings, through international booking platforms.
- Travel gear and other products, where a programme exists.
- Travel insurance and transport, where a programme exists.
These are all programmes run by companies outside the Philippines.
What I do not earn a commission on
- The trips. No payment for a trip is taken through this website. No trip is for sale on this website today — the trips are being planned and you can only join a free waitlist. When a trip does run, the booking and the money go to a registered tour operator, under their terms. I intend to be paid a marketing commission by that operator for the work of filling the trip. I will state the arrangement on the trip page before any place is sold, and no money for a trip will ever go to me or to a private account.
- Local guides, boat crews and families on the islands. I never take a cut of what they are paid.
- The paid consult, if and when it opens. You pay for my time. Nobody pays me to recommend anything on the call or to send you to them, and the written summary you get afterwards contains no affiliate links. The one thing I will not pretend: if you later book something through a marked affiliate link on this website instead of going direct, I earn a commission on that booking, the same as any other reader. That is the only way money from your trip can reach me, it costs you nothing extra, and it does not change what I tell you on the call.
What a commission does not buy
A company cannot pay me to recommend a place. I write about places I have actually been, and the reason a place is in an article is that I think it is worth your time. Where an affiliate programme happens to exist for it, I use it. Where it does not, the recommendation stays in anyway — which is why plenty of links on this site earn me nothing at all.
If I have not been somewhere myself, I say so.
The photos
Most photos here are my own. Where I use a stock photo, the caption under it says it is a stock photo and tells you what it is not — not the boat, the room or the operator described in the text. I do not use stock photos of people, so a face on this site is never standing in for a guide or a boat crew I have written about.
In a paid piece, a photo supplied by the company gets the same treatment: the caption says who supplied it. A #ad label at the top tells you the article was paid for; it does not tell you anything about a single photo, so the photos carry their own labels.
Why I do this
Affiliate commission is what lets these guides stay free to read, with no paywall and no ads following you around. It is not a large amount of money.