How we make money — and what we won't take money for.

krumlov.org is funded entirely by affiliate commissions. When you click through to a partner site from one of our pages and complete a booking, we earn a small percentage — at no extra cost to you, ever. That is the whole revenue model. There is no other.

What we take money for

Booking commissions from a short, fixed list of travel partners. Each one is named below with what we use them for and what they pay us.

• Booking.com — accommodation. We earn a percentage of Booking.com's commission on completed stays. We do not earn on the headline booking value, and we earn nothing if you cancel.
• GetYourGuide and Viator — tours, tickets, and experiences. We earn a commission on completed bookings. We use both because GetYourGuide tends to have better European inventory and Viator is dominant for US visitors.
• RegioJet, Trainline, Omio — transport. We earn a small commission on completed coach and rail bookings on the Prague–Krumlov route and on the cross-border alternatives from Vienna, Salzburg, Munich, and Linz.
• Welcome Pickups — door-to-door private transfers. We earn a referral fee on completed transfers. We only mention them where a private transfer is genuinely the right answer (late arrivals, families with luggage, en-route stops).
• DiscoverCars — car rental. We earn a referral fee on completed rentals. We surface this only on pages where a car is genuinely useful — day trips around South Bohemia, or self-driving routes from Austria/Germany — not as a default for everyone.

What we will not take money for

This list matters more than the previous one. We don't accept any of the following, and the boundary isn't going to move:

• Display ads. No banner ads, no Mediavine / Raptive / AdSense, no sticky ad rails, no pop-ups. The page weight budget on this site is under 500 KB; display advertising would break that on the first ad call alone, and would weaken the editorial signal we depend on.
• Sponsored posts and paid articles. Not labelled as sponsored, not unlabelled. We don't write paid editorial. We don't accept "we'll send a draft, you publish it" submissions.
• Paid press trips or hosted stays. If we accept free accommodation, free meals, or a free guided tour from a property or operator, that property cannot appear in our editorial recommendations. We treat this as a hard rule and we will not relax it for individual cases.
• Paid placement in rankings. Nobody buys their way into a "top picks" list. The editorial top three on /where-to-stay exists to be worth trusting; if it can be bought, it isn't.
• Local advertising slots. No sidebar banners, no advertorial blocks, no "Featured by" boxes. Operators and properties contact us about this regularly; the answer is always no.
• Booking inventory of our own. We are not a booking engine. We will not become one. When you want to book, we send you to a partner.

How affiliate links work, mechanically

Affiliate links on this site are cloaked under /go/[partner]/[slug] for clean URLs and internal click tracking. When you click one, your browser is redirected to the partner site with our tracking ID attached. The partner records your click; if you book within their cookie window (typically 24 hours to 30 days depending on partner), we get credit. We do not track your booking details beyond the redirect — we only see aggregated commission reports from the partner.

What this means for our recommendations

Affiliate revenue is our incentive to recommend hotels, tours, and transport that are good, because unhappy readers don't book again, don't share our pages, and don't recommend us to others. It is in our long-term interest for our top picks to actually be the right answer for the reader's situation — even where that means recommending the cheaper, lower-commission option.

Where a property or activity is not available through any of our affiliate partners, we'll still recommend it if it's the right answer — we'll just send you to the property's own website with no commission to us. Trains and coaches in Czechia are an example: the most useful link for some routes is the operator's own site (cd.cz for Czech Railways), and we'll send you there directly.

Ownership disclosures

In addition to affiliate relationships, a founder of krumlov.org has a direct ownership interest in the following property listed on this site. We flag this clearly wherever the property is recommended — not just here — per the FTC's endorsement guides (16 CFR Part 255), the EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, and the UK CAP code on material connections.

• Wellness Pension Ametyst (Latrán 72, Český Krumlov) — co-owned by a founder of krumlov.org. Reviewed editorially at /hotels/pension-ametyst with the ownership disclosure shown prominently on that page. The property is also linked from /where-to-stay as a separately-labelled "disclosed pick" below — not within — the editorial top three. We earn the standard Booking.com affiliate commission when readers book through us; we do not adjust the editorial picks list to favour owner-affiliated properties.

If we add other owner-affiliated properties or services in the future, they will appear in this list on the same day they appear anywhere else on the site. If you suspect an undisclosed conflict, email us — we'll investigate and either disclose or remove.

Why we publish this in detail

Most travel sites disclose the existence of affiliate links. Few say what they won't take money for. That second list is the one that determines whether the recommendations on this site are worth your time. We'd rather be explicit and lose the option to take certain kinds of revenue than be vague and have you wonder.

Questions?

Email hello@krumlov.org if you want any of this clarified, or if you've spotted something on the site that looks like it contradicts the rules above. We take both seriously.