Independence
Most travel sites promise independence in a sentence and never explain the mechanism. A promise you cannot check is worth nothing, so this page describes exactly how money reaches this site, which links carry it, and what stops it from reaching the editorial ordering.
Current status
As of 2026-08-17, no link on this site earns any commission. There is no affiliate account attached to any page, no sponsored placement, and no commercial agreement with any property or booking platform. Every booking link points to the property’s own website because that is where the reader gets the best rate, not because anyone pays for it.
What commission means, and what it costs you
When a booking link earns a commission, the money comes out of the property’s marketing budget, not out of your rate. You pay exactly the same price whether you reach the hotel through this site, through a search engine, or by typing its address yourself. If that were ever untrue of a link here, the link would be removed rather than disclosed.
Which links carry a commission
Only accommodation booking buttons, and only some of them. Roughly half the properties listed here belong to hotel groups that operate a public affiliate programme; the other half — independents, and groups that distribute exclusively direct — have no such programme and cannot be monetised at all.
Both kinds of link look and behave identically, and both go to the property’s own booking engine. The only visible difference is the provider line under the button. A commission-bearing link is marked in the page source with rel="sponsored", which is the machine-readable version of this disclosure.
Links to official sources, regulations, and awarding bodies never earn anything. Neither does anything in a rule page.
Why the ordering cannot be bought
This is the part that matters, and the part you can verify. Properties in the accommodation carousel are listed in alphabetical order. Not by commission, not by relationship, not by a hidden score. The ordering is a property of the filesystem, applied before any commercial information is loaded, and it is identical for a property that pays and one that cannot.
You can check it. Read the list top to bottom: if it is alphabetical, no one bought a position. If it ever stops being alphabetical without this page changing to explain the new rule, we have broken our own commitment and you should treat the whole list as compromised.
What money cannot buy here
- Inclusion. A property appears here because it carries a distinction from a named body, with a year and a link to that body. No property has ever been added because it asked, and none can pay to be.
- Position in any list. See above.
- The content of a page. No commercial partner reads, reviews, approves, or comments on anything before publication.
- Protection from removal. A page we can no longer stand behind is removed from the index, whether or not it earns anything. A commission has never delayed a correction and never will.
- Silence about a problem. If a property is bad value, in a bad location, or misrepresents itself, that is reported regardless of whether its booking link pays.
Advertising, sponsorship and paid content
There is none, and there is no plan for any. No display advertising, no sponsored posts, no paid inclusion, no affiliate content written to fill a commission quota, no pop-ups or interstitials of any kind. If a revenue source is ever added, it will be described on this page before it goes live, not after.
How to hold us to this
If you find a link that earns a commission and is not disclosed, a list whose order does not match its stated rule, or any claim on this page that does not match what the site actually does, write to corrections@datumbali.com. It will be corrected, and the correction stays visible in the page history.
Verified 2026-08-17 · Legal notice · Privacy