How this site makes money, and what it changes

Some links here earn money. This page says which, how much of the decision that changes, and where the money was deliberately left on the table.

The arrangement, plainly

A handful of pages link to companies that sell something: car hire, rooms, eSIMs, pre-booked cars, and the firms that handle flight compensation claims. If you follow one of those links and go on to book, the company pays a commission. You pay the same as you would have paid arriving there any other way.

Those links are marked in the page source as sponsored, and they run through a redirect on this domain before going out — which is how the commission is attributed and also how you can tell one apart from an ordinary link: partner links pass through /go/, everything else does not.

Nothing on this site is sold directly. There is no checkout here and no booking here.

What it changes, and what it does not

It does not change what a page recommends. The clearest evidence is the recommendations themselves: several pages here send you to the cheapest option and away from the button. The transfers page says the airline coach beats a pre-booked car on price and says so above the only commercial block on the page. The car rental page tells you not to hire a car for a single journey into Dubai. The luggage page tells you there is no storage here and sells nothing at all.

It does change which companies get named at all. A booking platform we have no arrangement with does not get a button. That is a real limit and it is worth knowing about: the absence of a name here is not a judgement on it.

The one arrangement worth explaining in detail

Flight compensation is different from the rest, and the difference is uncomfortable enough that it belongs in writing.

Claim handlers pay us when a claim is submitted to the airline — not when the airline pays out, and not when you receive anything. So the commercial incentive on those pages is for you to file, whether or not filing was a good idea.

That is exactly why the compensation page is built the way it is. It says in its first paragraph that a flight leaving Sharjah carries no fixed payout, before it offers anything. The branch for readers whose flight does not qualify carries no button at all, and it hands them to a page with no commercial link on it whatsoever. The section on what the airline must give you during a delay — meals, a room, transport to it — is there in full, even though every reader who gets what they are owed is a reader with less reason to click anything.

We do not claim this is guaranteed by our incentives. It is not. It is a rule the site is written under, and this paragraph exists so you can hold it to that.

Where there are no commercial links, and why

The arrivals and departures boards. No buttons of any kind. Someone checking whether a flight has landed is not shopping, and a board with a sales block on it stops being an instrument.

The passenger rights page. It explains what the airline owes you when a flight is disrupted, including the hotel and the transport to it. Ending it with something to buy would undercut the only thing it is for.

The luggage storage page. The service is not in the airport’s own list of what it provides. A button on a page whose whole point is that it is not listed would be worth less than the trust it costs.

The section of any disruption page that deals with an overnight stay. If the airline is obliged to provide the room, we are not going to sell you one in the same breath.

Nobody has paid for coverage

No company has paid to appear on this site, to be described favourably, or to have a competitor left out. There are no sponsored articles, no paid reviews and no advertising slots. If that changes, it will be written here before it appears anywhere else.

Questions about this

If a page reads as though it is selling rather than answering, that is worth telling us: say which page and what specifically. It is the only feedback that can correct this particular failure, because from the inside it is nearly invisible.