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How we work

Our promise

Some links on this site earn us a commission. Here is exactly how that works, and the five promises that keep it from bending what we tell you.

Gently Yonder is written to be the travel friend you would trust with your own money: the one who tells you when the expensive option isn’t worth it, before you book. That only works if the way we earn money never decides what we recommend. These are the rules we hold ourselves to, in plain words, with examples you can check.

The five promises

1. No one pays to be recommended.

No brand, hotel or tourism board pays to be included in a guide or to be ranked higher. Some links earn us a commission when you book through them, and the price you pay is the same. Where a platform we don’t earn from is the better answer, we name it: for Tokyo food tours, we point you to Viator first, and Viator pays us nothing.

2. We say when the free or cheaper option wins.

A commission is worth nothing to us if it costs you money you didn’t need to spend. So our guides say so when the cheaper path is the right one: Bangkok’s public river boat rather than a dinner cruise, ordinary tickets rather than a JR Pass when Tokyo and Kyoto are your only long legs, and an Early Bird ticket rather than Taiwan’s rail pass, even though a partner of ours sells both passes. For mobile data, we tell you unlimited plans only pay off if you really use the data.

3. We say what we checked, and when.

Prices, rules and opening details come from the operator, the regulator or the listing itself. Every guide shows when it last changed, and where a price or rule is time-sensitive we say when we checked it. Rules change faster than any guide can, so for entry requirements and taxes we point you to the official source and ask you to confirm before you travel.

4. We mark what we’ve tried and what we’ve only researched.

Most of what we publish is research: official sources, operators’ own terms and careful comparison, and our methodology page says plainly what we test and what we don’t. When one of us has stayed somewhere or used something, we say that too, and who paid: our Sydney hotel pick is a place one of us stayed in September 2026, at our own expense. Casey, whose voice you read in our guides, is a pen name for the editorial team, and the facts under that voice never bend.

5. When we’re wrong, we fix it in public.

Every correction to a fact we published goes on our corrections page, with the date, what we said and what is true. If you spot something we got wrong, tell us on X at @GentlyYonder.

How we make money

Gently Yonder is independent: no media company, airline or travel platform funds it. It is paid for by commissions from some of the services we mention. When you book through one of these links, the partner pays us a share and your price stays the same. Our partners today:

Plenty of what we link to pays us nothing: public transport, official tourism and government sites, hotels’ own websites, and platforms we don’t partner with.

What we won’t do: take payment to be included or ranked; accept a free trip, stay or product in exchange for coverage without saying so at the top of the guide; or put commission links in history, culture or reflective writing.

The standard we write to

Our editorial code comes down to one test: if most travel sites vanished tomorrow, little would be lost, but if Gently Yonder vanished, a reader should feel they had lost a trusted friend. Every guide should leave you a little wiser, calmer and more curious than when you arrived, and traffic is a consequence of that trust, not the goal.

So every recommendation has to pass a simple question before it goes in: would we genuinely recommend this to a friend, knowing their trip? We explain why it helps and when it doesn’t, and we keep the sales talk out.

We use AI tools to help research and draft; every article is reviewed and edited by a person against our guidelines, and we don’t publish unedited AI output. The details are in our editorial guidelines.

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