The short version
Some links on CityTown are affiliate links. If you click one and then book a hotel, buy a tour ticket, or purchase an eSIM, we may earn a commission from the seller. You pay exactly the same price as you would going direct — the commission comes out of the seller’s marketing budget, not your pocket. That’s the entire business model: no display ads, no sponsored posts, no selling your data.
How the links work
Our primary affiliate network is Travelpayouts, which handles tracking and payment for travel brands including hotel search (Hotellook, Trip.com), tours and attractions (GetYourGuide, Tiqets), eSIMs (Airalo and others), flights, car rental, airport transfers and travel insurance. We may add direct partnerships with individual brands over time; when we do, the same rules on this page apply.
You can always tell which links are affiliate links:
- They route through our
/go/redirect, so there’s a single, visible pattern for every commercial link on the site. - They’re marked
rel="sponsored nofollow"in the page code, which tells search engines (and anyone who checks) that the link is commercial. - A disclosure notice appears on every page before the first offer — you’ll never hit an affiliate link without having been told it’s there.
What the money never changes
Recommendations on CityTown are not paid placements. No brand pays to appear in a guide, no brand can pay to remove a criticism, and no brand reviews our pages before publication. The editorial process (described in our editorial policy) decides what we recommend first; affiliate links are attached afterwards, only where a relevant offer exists. When the honest answer is “skip it” or “book direct”, that’s what the page says — several of our guides tell you not to buy things.
Some page types carry no offers at all: best-time-to-visit guides, food guides and city hub pages are deliberately kept commercial-free so the reference layer of the site stays clean.
What we don’t do
- No display ads. There is no banner advertising on CityTown at this stage — pages load fast and stay readable.
- No popups or fake urgency. No “only 2 rooms left!” countdowns, no exit-intent boxes begging you to stay.
- No fabricated testing claims. If we haven’t personally used a product, we say we compared published prices and terms — we don’t pretend otherwise.
- No selling your email. If you sign up for our monthly email, it’s used for that email and nothing else — see the privacy policy.
Why we’re telling you this
Partly because disclosure is legally required, but mostly because the model only works if you trust the recommendations. A reader who books through our link because the guide genuinely helped is worth more to us — in every sense — than one who felt sold to. If you’d rather not use the affiliate links, that’s completely fine: every recommendation names the provider, so you can always search for it directly.
Questions about any link or placement on the site? Ask via the contact page.