This site contains affiliate links. Here is exactly what that means, who I work with, and how it does — and doesn’t — affect what I recommend. No legal padding.

When I link to a hotel, tour, ticket or travel product, some of those links are tracked. If you click one and end up booking, the company pays me a small commission. The price you pay is exactly the same as if you had gone to their site directly; the commission comes out of the company’s marketing budget.

Who I work with

I’m a participant in affiliate programs from these companies. I add or remove partners over time; this page reflects the current list.

  • Tiqets — museum and attraction tickets in Rome (Vatican, Colosseum), as a fallback when the official sites are sold out for your date.
  • GetYourGuide — guided tours, in particular the Vatican tours that include the Sistine-to-Basilica passage.
  • Booking.com via Stay22 — hotels and B&Bs; the link opens a Booking.com search for the neighbourhood I’m writing about.
  • Welcome Pickups — private airport transfers from Fiumicino.

Applications pending or planned, and listed here the day they go live: Holafly (eSIMs), Heymondo (travel insurance), Viator, Amazon.

How this affects what I recommend

It doesn’t. I recommend tickets, tours and places to stay based on whether they’re worth your money, not on which one pays. Where two options are genuinely equivalent and one pays a commission, I’ll link that one. I won’t recommend something inferior because it pays better.

A concrete example from the 3-day itinerary: the “Book these first” buttons send you to the official Colosseum and Vatican ticket sites, which pay me nothing — because that’s the right first stop. Tiqets appears underneath as the fallback for when the official slots are gone.

I don’t accept press trips or comps

This is separate from affiliate links, and worth being explicit about. I pay for every ticket, every meal, every night I write about. No press trips, sponsored stays or comped tours — the moment I accept one, you can’t trust me to tell you when something isn’t worth your money. If this ever changes, this page is where you’ll see it first.

Every page that carries affiliate links has a short notice near the first one. I don’t decorate individual links — that would be cluttered and patronising. Technically, affiliate links carry rel="sponsored nofollow", the search-engine standard for paid relationships; every one of them lives in a single registry in the site’s code, so I can tell you at any time which links pay and which don’t.

If you’d rather not

Clicking through one of my links costs you nothing and helps keep the lights on. If you’d rather not, that’s completely fine: search the hotel or ticket directly and book any way you like. The recommendation is the same either way.

Questions

Email me at hello@maxinrome.com. I read everything, and I update this page when anything changes.