Affiliate Disclosure

Last updated: 3 September 2026

Who we work with

We participate in one affiliate programme: Booking.com, through the affiliate network CJ Affiliate. Every accommodation link on this site — the “View on Booking.com” buttons on property pages, the banners on the blog, the promotional card in the navigation menu — leads to Booking.com.

That is the complete list. We are not paid by any hotel, guest house, villa or self-catering owner on Leisure Isle or anywhere else in Knysna, and no property has paid to appear here or to appear higher up a page. Nobody can buy a listing from us, because we do not sell them.

What it means for you

• You pay nothing extra. The price is exactly the same as going to Booking.com directly. Our commission is paid by Booking.com out of its own margin, not added to your bill.
• Deals and loyalty benefits still apply. Any discount, promotion or Genius benefit you would get booking directly, you get booking through us.
• Your booking is with Booking.com and the property, not with us. We are not a booking agent. We take no payment, hold no reservation, and cannot change or cancel one. Their terms, cancellation policy and customer support are what govern your stay.

How this affects what we list — honestly

It would be easy to write “our recommendations are completely independent” here. That would overstate it, so we won't.

Here is the accurate version:

• Our inventory is Booking.com's inventory. The properties on this site are drawn from Booking.com's listings for Leisure Isle. A guest house that takes bookings only by telephone, or lists solely on another platform, will not appear here — not because we judged it, but because it isn't in the data we work from. Leisure Isle is a small residential island and a good deal of what is let there is let privately, so if you are choosing between everything the island offers, this site is not a complete map of it.
• Commission does not change the running order. We earn the same rate whichever Booking.com property you choose, so we have no financial reason to push one over another. Properties are ordered by guest rating and review volume, not by what pays.
• Descriptions are ours; scores are not. We write the descriptions and choose which places to feature. The star ratings and review scores are Booking.com's own, computed from reviews left on Booking.com — we don't write, edit or filter them. What we do and do not do with reviews is set out in our reviews policy.
• We have not inspected anything. Nobody from this site has stayed at, visited or vetted these properties. We are not an inspectorate and no listing here carries our endorsement.
• We publish no prices. Not on any page. We hold no reliable price data, and a stale rate would mislead you into a decision. Rates and availability live on Booking.com, where they are current.

How to spot an affiliate link

You should never have to guess whether a link earns us money. These are the places on this site that do:

• Property pages: the “View on Booking.com” button, which carries a disclosure note next to it at every screen size.
• The navigation menu: the Booking.com Genius card inside each drop-down panel, marked “Sponsored”. This one appears on every page of the site.
• Blog sidebar: the accommodation banner and the Genius card that appear alongside articles on desktop, both marked “Sponsored”.
• Inside blog posts: a “planning your trip” card placed in the body of an article, which states underneath it that we earn a commission.
• The blog index: the wide Booking.com Genius banner, marked “Sponsored”.

Affiliate links also carry rel="sponsored nofollow noopener", as Google's guidelines require, so search engines can identify them too.

What we record when you click

Affiliate links pass through our own redirect at /api/affiliate/redirect before forwarding you to Booking.com. This exists so we can tell which articles and pages are actually useful. It records:

• which link or banner was clicked, and which page you clicked it from;
• a truncated IP address — the first three parts only, for example 197.234.61 rather than your full address, so it points at a rough network rather than at you. On the newer IPv6 addressing we keep the first three groups, which is a slightly narrower slice;
• a coarse device class from your browser's user agent (desktop, mobile or bot) — not the full user-agent string.

We do not record your full IP address, your name, your email address or any other identifier, and the redirect places no cookie on your device. Traffic identified as automated is filtered out before anything is logged. The Privacy & Cookie Policy covers this in full, including your rights over it under POPIA.

Booking.com will set its own cookies once you arrive on its site, under its own privacy policy. That part is outside our control.

Why we do it this way

Commission is what pays for this site: writing the guides, describing the places, keeping the listings current, and running the servers. The alternatives were charging readers or filling the pages with advertising, and this seemed the better bargain — you get the guide for nothing, and the cost falls on Booking.com rather than on you.

Standards we hold ourselves to

South Africa has no single statute that says “an affiliate site must disclose its commission” in those words. What it has is the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008, which prohibits failing to disclose a material fact where that silence amounts to a deception. Taking money to send you somewhere, and not saying so, is exactly the kind of thing that provision is for. So we treat disclosure as required, and we would treat it as required even if it weren't.

In practice we write to the stricter of the two standards that could apply to us. One is the terms of our own affiliate agreement with Booking.com through CJ Affiliate. The other is the United States Federal Trade Commission's guidance on endorsements and affiliate relationships, which is the more prescriptive, and which bites on any reader of ours who is in the US.

Applying it to everybody is simpler than working out where you are — and it is the answer we would give anyway.

Questions

If anything above is unclear, or you think we have got a disclosure wrong somewhere on the site, please contact us. We would rather fix it.