How we actually get paid

abhilaksh · JUNE 2026 · 5 MIN READ

There is a question almost everyone has and most people are too polite to ask outright. It usually arrives sideways, a few weeks into working together, phrased gently: so how does this work for you, exactly? What they mean, and are right to mean, is blunter than that. If the hotel pays you, aren’t you just steering me toward whoever pays you the most? It is the single most important question you can ask an advisor, and an advisory that won’t answer it plainly has told you something. So here is the whole model, opened up, including the uncomfortable part.

Where the money comes from

Two streams, and only two. The first is commission. When we book a hotel, the property pays us a commission — typically around ten per cent of the room cost — out of its own margin, the same margin it would otherwise have paid a booking site to deliver the reservation. This is not added to your rate. You pay the hotel’s standard rate, the one you’d pay booking direct, and the hotel pays us from money that was always going to leave its hands one way or another. On a great many bookings, this is the only way we’re paid, and it costs you nothing.

The second stream is a planning fee, which applies to complex work — a multi-stop itinerary with many properties, custom transport, reserved experiences, a detailed day-by-day document. Where a fee applies, it is quoted before any work begins, it is published rather than negotiated trip by trip, and it is often credited against the cost of the trip. The fee exists because building a genuinely good itinerary takes real hours, and time is the thing the travel industry has always been worst at pricing honestly.

That is the whole of it. Commission from the hotel, a transparent fee for the complex thinking. No markup hidden in your rate, no margin quietly inserted into a transfer, no kickback you’re not told about.

Commission from the hotel, a transparent fee for the complex work. That is the whole of it — no markup hidden in your rate, no margin quietly inserted anywhere.

Now the uncomfortable part

Here is the question that money model invites, and it deserves a real answer rather than a reassuring deflection. If hotels pay us to send guests, what stops us from sending you to whichever one pays best, regardless of whether it’s right for you?

Three things, and I’ll give them honestly rather than piously.

The first is that there is very little to game. Commission rates across the luxury hotels we’d actually consider for you are broadly similar — a band, not a spread. The difference between what one excellent property pays and what its excellent competitor pays is rarely large enough to tempt anyone, and certainly not large enough to be worth sending a client somewhere wrong. The incentive to steer simply isn’t as strong as the question assumes, because the hotels worth recommending mostly pay within the same range.

The second is the structure of the business itself, and this is the real safeguard. Our living does not come from your one booking. It comes from your next trip, and the trip after that, and the friend you tell. A single commission is small; a client who returns for a decade and refers their circle is the entire business. That arithmetic only works if the recommendation is right — if you come home from this trip convinced we put your interests first. The moment we trade your trip for a marginally better commission, we trade a decade of your custom for a few thousand rupees, which is a spectacularly bad deal for us. The incentive that matters most points in exactly the same direction as your interest: get this trip right.

The third is that we regularly recommend, and book, properties that pay us little or nothing — the independent riad, the small family-run hotel, the place that isn’t part of any program — because it was the right answer. And we tell clients, unprompted, when they should book direct or spend their points and not use us at all, which is the opposite of what someone optimising for commission would ever do. An advisor chasing the fee does not point you to the bookings they earn nothing on. We do, routinely, because the relationship is worth more than the transaction.

Why the fee, specifically

People sometimes accept the commission easily and then balk at the fee — surely, if the hotel already pays you, the planning should be free? It’s a fair instinct, and the answer is that the two pay for different things.

The commission pays for the booking. The fee pays for the thinking — the twenty hours of research, comparison, sequencing, matching and documentation that go into a complex multi-country trip before a single room is reserved. A trip with one hotel needs no fee; the commission covers it comfortably. A twelve-day itinerary across seven properties, with custom rail, reserved experiences and a built day-by-day document, is twenty hours of work that the commission alone doesn’t fairly cover, and pretending otherwise would mean either doing that work badly or quietly recouping it somewhere you can’t see. The honest version is a fee you can read in advance. The published schedule of what we charge exists precisely so that the conversation about money happens openly, at the start, rather than in a markup you’d never find.

The commission pays for the booking. The fee pays for the thinking. Charging openly for the second is the only alternative to recouping it somewhere you can’t see.

Where the interests actually line up

Strip it back and the alignment is simpler than the suspicion suggests. We are paid the same whether your stay is wonderful or merely fine — the commission lands either way. What changes, depending on whether the trip is genuinely right, is whether you come back, and whether you tell your friends. So the thing we are actually optimising for is not this booking’s commission. It is your verdict on the trip, because your verdict is the asset. That is an unusually clean alignment, and it is the real reason you can trust a recommendation even though a hotel is paying for the booking behind it.

It is not a claim that we have no incentives — everyone has incentives, and an advisor who claims to be a pure disinterested oracle is not being straight with you. It is a claim that our strongest incentive, by a wide margin, is the one that points at your trip being right. We’ve written separately about the bookings where you shouldn’t use us at all; that piece and this one are the same argument from two directions. The willingness to send you elsewhere when we add nothing is what should make you trust us when we say to stay.

The whole ledger, visible

So: the hotel pays us a commission, inside a rate you’d pay anyway. Complex trips carry a fee you’re quoted upfront and can read on our charges page. We book the low-commission independent when it’s right, recommend booking direct when that’s right, and make our living over years rather than per transaction. There is no third stream, no hidden markup, no number you aren’t shown.

The question — aren’t you just sending me where it pays most? — is exactly the right one to ask, of us and of anyone who books your travel. The answer that should reassure you is not “trust us.” It is the visible ledger, the broadly equal commissions, the business built on your return rather than your single booking, and the standing willingness to point you away from us when that’s the honest call. Ask the question. The quality of the answer tells you most of what you need to know.

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