Affiliate disclosure
I earn a commission when you book a tour through a link on this site, and it costs you nothing extra. That commission is the only money this site makes. The central answer on almost every page here — that the park is free, that parking is free, that the ranger walks are free, and that with a car you need no tour at all — earns me nothing whatsoever.
The arrangement, in plain terms
San Antonio Missions Tickets takes part in the GetYourGuide affiliate programme. Every tour link and every booking panel on this site carries a partner id. If you book after clicking one, GetYourGuide pays me a percentage of the tour price. You pay exactly what you would pay going to GetYourGuide directly. Nothing is added to your bill, and no discount is withheld if you go around me.
There are no sponsored placements, no paid listings and no advertising on this site. No operator has paid to be included, no operator has seen a page before it published, and none of them can buy a position in a list or a sentence in a review. I do not run or crew any of the five tours here; who writes this site sets out what I actually do.
The part that costs me money to write
Here is the whole conflict in one sentence: the correct answer on this site is usually the one that pays me nothing. Four examples, because one would look like a gesture.
- Entry is free, and I say so before anything else. The single most valuable question anyone asks this site is whether they need tickets. The answer is no, it is the first thing on that page and on the homepage, and a reader who acts on it may well book nothing at all.
- The cheapest way to see all four missions earns me nothing. San Antonio BCycle has docks at every mission site and a day pass at $25, against US$65 for the cheapest guided tour listed here. There is no affiliate programme in it, no referral fee and no arrangement of any kind, and it is still the recommendation on the Mission Reach page. Check the current price with the operator; their pricing page carries no effective date.
- Two commissionable products were removed and not replaced with another. This site set out to recommend two guided missions bike tours. Both now return errors, and there is no live missions bike tour left to link to. The obvious move was to point riders at a van tour that does pay. Instead the recommendation became the bike-share above, which does not.
- The product that would pay me most is the one I say least for. The dearest tour here is US$159 a head, and its average rests on 3 ratings, only one of which has any text at all. Every page that prints that score prints the 3 beside it, and there is no review page for it, because 3 people is not evidence.
None of that is generosity. A site that gives the right answer when there is no money in it is the only reason to believe the pages where there is money in it. If you cannot check my incentives, you have to be able to check my facts, and the quickest test of both is whether the free option is on the page at all.
What the commission does not do
- It does not order the lists. On the tours page the products run cheapest first, which puts the highest-paying one last.
- It does not hide a bad review. The only critical review in the whole pool is quoted in full, uncut, on that same page, and referred to again on the reviews hub.
- It does not inflate a rating. No score appears anywhere on this site without the number of ratings behind it in the same breath, and two of the five products are described as having too few to mean anything.
- It does not let me tell you what you are buying. This site never asserts what a tour includes beyond the words on its own booking panel. That is the rule that costs the most conversions and it is not negotiable.
The links here that earn nothing at all
Most of them, in fact. Nothing is paid for the links to nps.gov, to VIA, to San Antonio BCycle, to the Alamo, to the four parish telephone numbers, or to any map on this site. If you follow the advice on the free pages and skip the tours entirely, this site earns nothing from your visit and has still done its job.
If you would rather I earned nothing but still want to book, go to GetYourGuide directly and search for what you want. You will pay the same. I would rather say that out loud than have you wonder whether the recommendation was bought.
Questions about any of this? Contact me, or read how the site decides what goes on a page — including the list of things it could not verify and therefore does not print.