Affiliate disclosure

Last updated September 19, 2026

Starna (this site) is free to read. It is funded by affiliate links placed within its pages. This page discloses how those links work, and the principles we apply so that they do not affect what is published.

How affiliate links work

If a sign-up or purchase is made after following one of our affiliate links, the partner pays us a commission.

  • You never pay more. The price is the same whether you go through our link or straight to the partner
  • A commission arises only where a sign-up or purchase actually takes place at the destination
  • Following a link passes information identifying which site the visit came from. Starna adds nothing that identifies you personally

Prices and offers change at the partner's discretion, so we cannot give a continuing guarantee that an amount shown here always matches the partner's own. Please confirm the final price and terms at the destination.

Who we work with

We never publish an affiliate link for a programme we have not joined. At present, affiliate links appear in five contexts.

  • The banner under the fare section (partners: Omio, Klook, Trip.com, KKday, GetYourGuide) — below the fares on a guide page, a banner may link to bookings for trains, buses and ferries serving that city (Omio, Trip.com), or to transit passes and airport transfers (Klook, KKday, GetYourGuide). A banner appears only where a booking site fits that city and mode
  • Multi-currency cards (partner: Wise) — on guide pages, under the fare section, where no banner of the kind above fits that city and mode. The wording comes in two versions, chosen by whether that mode accepts Visa or Mastercard contactless for rides
  • Tickets, transit passes and airport links (partners: Klook, Omio, Trip.com, KKday, GetYourGuide) — fare rows that can be bought online carry a "Buy" button; the links sit inside the dialog it opens. The dialog lists the official seller first; the partner link carries an AD label and a plain statement that we earn a commission if you buy
  • Accommodation (via Stay22) — a banner at the foot of city summary pages and country pages. The link passes through Stay22, which forwards you to hotel search for that city on one of Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo or Agoda, chosen by Stay22 based on your region and other signals. We do not pick the destination site
  • Travel eSIM (partner: Saily) — a banner on guide pages, after the payment section or the key-facts section. The banner may show the partner's app icon and a coupon code for readers; the coupon lowers what you pay the partner and gives nothing to this site

Most outbound links on this site are not affiliate links at all: operator websites, official fare pages and similar.

What is sent when you follow an affiliate link

Each affiliate link carries a fixed string that names the placement it came from (for example fare-milan-airport-access: fare table, Milan, airport access). It contains nothing that identifies you; every reader who uses the same placement sends the same string.

Depending on the partner, the link may pass through the tracking domain of an affiliate network (for Omio, one operated by impact.com; for Klook, affiliate.klook.com used by Klook's own partner programme; for GetYourGuide, its own short-link domain gyg.me; for KKday, the one used by KKday's own partner programme; for Saily, the tracking domain used by Saily's own partner programme; for Wise, prf.hn operated by Partnerize; for accommodation, stay22.com operated by Stay22) before forwarding to the partner's site. Trip.com links do not pass through a tracking domain; they point at Trip.com's own site with an identifier for this site added to the URL. On the way through, the network records the click and may set cookies on its own domain. This traffic happens after you click, between your browser and the partner or network; it does not happen merely by reading a page on this site. For Wise links, the click also tells the network that it came from this site (the site address only, not the page you were reading). Once you arrive, the partner's own privacy policy applies.

Every affiliate link is labelled AD

An AD label is placed immediately next to every affiliate link.

A disclosure page in the footer is not, on its own, sufficient. You decide whether to follow a link at the link itself, and the label belongs where that decision is made.

  • Affiliate links carry an AD label next to them
  • Non-affiliate links carry no label
  • Banners carry the AD label next to their heading or button. On the multi-currency card (Wise) banner, a note next to it states that we earn a commission
  • The "Buy" button on a fare row carries no label itself: it opens a dialog containing both the official seller and the partner, and the AD label sits on the partner link inside that dialog

The presence or absence of the label is therefore usable information. A link to an operator's site with no AD label is exactly that — a plain link, with nothing in it for us.

Commissions do not affect what we publish

Commission arrangements do not feed into editorial judgement.

  • Whether something is covered does not depend on whether we can earn from it
  • Ordering is never set by commission rates
  • How a service is assessed or described does not change because a partnership exists
  • Where an official booking or purchase route exists, the official option is always listed first
  • A "Buy" button appears only on rows that can genuinely be bought online, officially or through a partner. Whether a partner sells the ticket never changes which rows appear or in what order

If the simplest thing to do is buy a stored-value card at the station, that is what the page says. Where the option with an affiliate link is not the best one, the best one is stated first.

How partners are chosen

We do not add a partner merely because a programme has been offered to us. We consider how travellers actually use the service, examine user reports and support quality, and leave out services we do not trust.

Existing partners are removed if their reputation deteriorates, or if we identify problems in how they deal with customers.

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