How we make money
Who pays for this, and what it buys them
Sanibel Tourist Attractions is free to read and carries no advertising. It is funded by commission on tour bookings — and that is the entire arrangement, written out.
If you follow a tour link on this site and book something, our booking partner pays us a percentage of what you spent. You pay the same price you would have paid going direct — there is no markup and no booking fee added at our end. No operator pays to be listed here, to be ranked higher, or to be given an award, and none of them sees a page before it publishes.
That paragraph is the whole thing. The rest of this page is the detail, because a disclosure you have to take on faith is not much of a disclosure.
The money
We earn a commission when you book. Here is the whole arrangement.
Sanibel Tourist Attractions is free to read and carries no advertising. It is paid for by commission: when you follow one of our tour links to Viator, our booking partner, and book something, Viator pays us a percentage of what you spent. You pay exactly the same price you would have paid going direct. There is no markup, no surcharge and no tracking fee added to your booking. If you book the same tour by typing the operator's name into a search engine instead, you pay the same and we get nothing — which is fine, and is why we would rather earn the click than trick you into it.
What the commission does not buy
It does not buy a place on a page.
No operator can pay to appear on Sanibel Tourist Attractions, and none has ever been offered the chance. We do not sell listings, features, sponsored posts, newsletter slots or “partner spotlights”.
It does not buy a ranking.
The order of tours on a page is set by our own criteria — what the trip actually is, how it is rated by people who booked it, what it costs, how it suits the audience that page is for. Commission rate is not one of the inputs, and we do not look it up when we rank.
It does not buy a badge.
Awards are editorial. They are argued for in writing, on the page, with a reason you can disagree with. A badge you cannot see the reasoning behind is a badge worth nothing.
It does not decide what we cover.
A large part of this site is about things that earn us nothing: free beaches, public parks, trails, town-run museums, where to leave the car. Those pages get the same research as the ones that pay.
How an award is actually decided
Every category page on this site has a small number of award slots, written before we go looking at inventory. An editor decides what question the slot answers — “which one would I put a family of six on?” — and writes the reasoning. Only then do we match it against what is bookable, and if nothing in the inventory honestly answers the question, the slot goes unfilled rather than being handed to the nearest thing.
- Editor's Pick
Editor's Pick: The one an editor would book for themselves, having been on it or on its competitors. Rating and price matter, but this award is allowed to ignore both if the trip is better.
- Best Value
Best Value: The best experience per dollar in its category — not the cheapest listing. A cheap tour that spends half its time in a car park does not win this.
- Best for Families
Best for Families: Departure times that survive a nap schedule, a shaded or enclosed boat, restrooms, and an operator who will not mind a four-year-old losing interest halfway.
- Best Private Tour
Best Private Tour: For a group of four or more, the private option that comes out ahead once you divide the private price by the number of people who would otherwise buy a seat.
- Small Group
Small Group: A hard cap on numbers, published by the operator, that genuinely changes what the trip is like.
- Best for Beginners
Best for Beginners: Instruction included, no prerequisite, equipment supplied, and a guide-to-guest ratio that means someone is watching you.
- Top Rated
Top Rated: Reported from the booking partner's verified review data — this one is arithmetic, not judgement, and we say so.
A tour can lose an award between one month and the next, and they do. Operators change boats, sell the business, cut the guide, or start running the same trip with twice the passengers. When the reason for an award stops being true, the award comes off.
Private charters, and why we show them
A large share of what is bookable here is private: charters, private guides, whole-boat hires, house-delivered rentals. Those carry a higher price and, yes, a bigger commission, and plenty of sites either hide them to look cheap or push them at everyone to look expensive. We do neither. Where a page has both, we show both and tell you the arithmetic: a couple is almost always better off on a shared departure, and a family of six is often better off on a private boat once you multiply the per-seat price by six. That is a real trade-off with a real answer, and it changes with the size of your group.
We will never describe a shared tour as private, or a semi-private departure as a charter, to make a listing look better than it is. What a product is comes from the operator's own terms, not from our headline.
What you can check
Outbound booking links on this site are marked as sponsored links in the page's own markup, and they pass through our own redirect so we can count the click. We count clicks and bookings. We do not sell your data, we do not build a profile of you, and the redirect stores no raw IP address. Every page that carries a monetised link says so above the link, not in the small print at the bottom.
The awkward questions
The conflicts we actually have
Every commission-funded publisher has them. Pretending otherwise is the tell.
We are paid more when you spend more.
True, and worth knowing. Our defence is structural rather than moral: the commission rate does not vary by operator, our award slots are written before we look at inventory, and a large part of this site covers things that cost nothing at all. Free Things to Do is one of the most-read pages on the site and earns us nothing.
We only earn on what our partner carries.
Some excellent Sanibel operators do not sell through Viator at all. They still appear in our guides, unlinked and unpaid, because leaving the best option out to protect a commission would make the guide worthless. If the right answer is “phone the man at the marina”, that is what the page says.
We know what gets clicked.
Outbound clicks are counted, by page and by position, so we can see which pages readers act on. We use that to decide what to write next and where a booking link genuinely belongs — not to reorder recommendations toward whatever paid best last month.
Prices you see are the partner's, at the moment we fetched them.
Every price on this site is stamped with when it was checked. Tour pricing moves with season and demand, and the number that counts is the one on the operator's checkout page, not ours.
If you would rather not
You are under no obligation
Nothing here is gated. You can read every guide, take every recommendation, write down the operator's name, book direct by phone, and we will not have earned a penny. We would rather that than lock a page behind an email address or bury the useful sentence under three paragraphs of preamble.
If you do book through us, thank you — it is what pays for someone to go and check whether that car park is still free. Either way, tell us when we get something wrong.
Who we are and how we work
- About us
Who publishes this guide, and why it exists.
- Editorial standards
How we research, verify, label and correct what we publish.
- Our writers
The bylines on this site, and what each of them covers.
- Contact
Corrections, questions and press enquiries.
Back to reading about Sanibel: the homepage, attractions or guides.