Affiliate Disclosure

The short version

Tour and activity cards on this site link to GetYourGuide. Hotel and neighbourhood links, the "see stays in this area" buttons on where to stay in Istanbul, go through Stay22, which forwards you to Booking.com and pays us a commission on the same terms. If you book after clicking one, the platform pays us a commission out of its own margin. Your price is identical either way, and clicking costs you nothing.

We are not a tour operator or a travel agency. We sell nothing, take no payments and act as nobody's agent.

Who does what

We compare listings and link out. The platform takes your payment, issues the voucher and handles customer service. The company named on the listing runs the actual tour, walk, cruise or transfer. If a departure is cancelled or a guide fails to show, that is resolved between you, the platform and the operator under their policies. We have no standing in that conversation and cannot refund or reschedule anything.

Where we sell nothing, the page sends you to the official source directly, with no tracking and no commission to us. That covers MuseumPass İstanbul, sold by the Ministry on muze.gov.tr, and the working mosques, which are free.

What the commission does not buy

Placement, ratings, wording. Nobody has paid to appear on this site or to be described in a particular way, and no operator sees a page before it is published.

The test is on the pages themselves: several of the most-read pages here send you to an official ticket office that pays us nothing, and recommend skipping a guided option that would. Where a tour is worth its markup we say why in the same terms, whether time saved, a room you cannot otherwise enter or a queue you cannot otherwise skip.

Ratings and reviews

Every rating and review count shown on a tour card is the platform's own published number. We calculate no rating of our own, this site carries no aggregate rating of its own in its markup (it has no reviews), and we write no testimonials. Quoted reviews are short excerpts kept as published, with the source.

Prices

Tour prices here are the lowest adult rate on the listing at the last check, and ticket prices are the official rate on the institution's own page. Both move: platforms reprice constantly, and Turkish museums and palaces adjust admission often, the palaces in lira. The figure that counts is the one on the checkout page before you pay. When it disagrees with ours, the checkout is right and we would like to know.

The nightly bands on the where to stay in Istanbul page are a separate thing again. They are the middle half of the rates a hotel search returned for one midweek night, and they are there to compare areas with each other. They are not a quote, and they move with the date you pick.