Affiliate & Advertising Disclosure
How Hercules Caves makes money, in full. There are three ways, all of them disclosed here, and none of them lets anyone buy a recommendation.
1. In short
- Our booking service: we charge more than the gate price, and the difference is our margin. The official price is shown next to ours on every booking page.
- Affiliate commission: some links to hotels, riads and tours earn us a commission if you book through them, at no extra cost to you.
- Advertising: not currently running. If we introduce it, ads will be labelled and this page will be updated first.
2. How affiliate links work
When we link to a partner, the link carries a tracking code identifying us. If you book, the partner pays us a percentage of what they earn. You pay exactly the same price as you would going direct — the commission comes out of the partner's margin, not your pocket.
Every affiliate link on this site carries the HTML attribute rel="sponsored nofollow", which is how search engines are told the link is commercial. Pages containing affiliate links show a disclosure at the top, before the links appear.
3. Who we have relationships with
We participate in affiliate programmes covering accommodation, tours and transfers. The current list of partners is maintained in our codebase and published here; if we add one, this page changes at the same time.
4. What commission does not buy
No hotel, riad, restaurant, tour operator or partner can pay to appear in a guide, to be recommended, to be ranked higher, or to have criticism removed. We have never accepted payment for a recommendation and we do not intend to.
Where we think something is overrated, we say so — including things we could earn commission on, and including our own booking service, whose price we openly compare with buying direct.
Where a partner relationship could reasonably look like it influenced what we wrote, we say so in the article itself rather than relying on this page.
5. Advertising
We do not currently display advertising. If and when we do, ads will be clearly labelled as advertising and visually separated from editorial content, advertising cookies will require their own consent, and our Privacy and Cookie policies will be updated before the first ad is served.
Advertisers will have no influence over editorial content, and we will not accept advertising that is indistinguishable from a guide.
6. Press trips and gifted stays
If we accept a free or discounted stay, meal or activity in order to review it, we disclose that in the piece itself. Accepting hospitality does not commit us to a positive review, and we tell providers so before accepting.
7. Questions
If you want to know whether a specific link or recommendation is commercial, ask at [email protected] and we will tell you straight.