Here it is formatted — copy straight from below into a Squarespace text block and the headings, bold and bullets should carry over.

Three phrases need linking once it's in Squarespace: "Privacy Policy" (twice) and "Work With Me". I've left them as plain text so nothing pastes in as a broken link.

Affiliate & Advertising Disclosure

Skip to Malou

Last updated: 28 September 2026

The short version

Some links on this blog earn us a small commission if you book or buy through them. Some posts are paid for, or were made possible by a hotel, brand or tourism partner. Every one of those is labelled where you'll see it — at the top of the post, not buried at the bottom.

None of it costs you anything extra, and none of it buys a good review. If we didn't like a place, we either say so or we don't write about it.

1. Affiliate links

An affiliate link is an ordinary link with a tracking code attached. If you click it and go on to book a hotel, buy a product or reserve a tour, the company pays us a small percentage of that sale. You pay exactly the same price you would have paid without the link.

We use affiliate links in posts where a recommendation naturally calls for one — a hotel we've stayed in, a beach tent we actually pack, a tour we've taken as a family.

Programmes we participate in, or may participate in, include:

  • Booking.com and Expedia (hotels and villas)

  • Viator and GetYourGuide (tours and experiences)

  • Amazon Associates (travel gear, baby and toddler products, books)

  • SafetyWing and other travel insurance providers

  • Individual hotel, villa, shop and brand programmes, including Barbadian businesses

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

How to spot them

Affiliate links are marked in one or more of these ways:

  • A disclosure line at the top of any post that contains them

  • The word (affiliate) or (ad) beside the link or in the caption

  • A note in the section or resource box where the link sits

If you'd rather not use an affiliate link, you can always search for the hotel or product directly. It makes no difference to what you read here.

Cookies

When you click an affiliate link, the partner usually places a cookie on your device so a later booking is credited to this blog. That cookie belongs to them, not to us — what they collect is governed by their privacy policy. See the Privacy Policy, Sections 5 and 6.

2. Sponsored and paid content

Sometimes a hotel, brand, restaurant or tourism body pays us to write a post, to feature a property, or to include a link. When that happens:

  • The post is labelled "Sponsored", "Paid partnership with [name]" or "Ad" at the top, before you read a word of it.

  • The label stays on the post permanently. It isn't removed once the campaign ends.

  • We write the words. A sponsor may review a draft for factual accuracy — dates, prices, spellings — but does not have approval over our opinion.

  • We don't publish a paid post about something we wouldn't recommend to a friend visiting Barbados.

Paid links inserted into older posts are marked in the same way, and carry the rel="sponsored" attribute so search engines can see them for what they are.

3. Gifted stays, press trips and complimentary experiences

Occasionally a hotel hosts our stay, a restaurant covers a meal, or a tour operator invites us on an experience so that we can write about it. This is common in travel writing and it's disclosed here the same way money is:

  • The post says clearly that the stay, meal or experience was complimentary, hosted or gifted.

  • A hosted stay is never conditional on a positive review, and we don't accept invitations that come with that condition attached.

  • If an experience wasn't good, that goes in the post. If a property was wrong for families, we say why.

  • Where our own family travel costs are paid by us — which is most of the time — no disclosure is needed, and none appears.

Gifted products follow the same rule: if a brand sent it free, the post says so, whether or not we ended up liking it.

4. Brand partnerships

Longer-term partnerships — an ongoing collaboration with a hotel group, a tourism board or a family or sustainability brand — are disclosed in every piece of content they touch, including the newsletter and social posts, and are listed on the Work With Me page.

We only work with businesses that fit what this blog is about: Caribbean travel, family travel, sustainable tourism and slower island living. We turn down most enquiries, including ones that pay well.

5. Display advertising

This blog currently carries no third-party display advertising. If that changes — for example if the site joins an ad network such as Mediavine or Raptive — this page will be updated before the first ad appears, and the cookie section of the Privacy Policy will be updated with it.

6. Our own products

Some pages link to guides, maps and downloads that we created and sell ourselves. We earn the full price of those, and we'd rather say so plainly than call them "resources". They're marked as paid products wherever they appear.

Free downloads are genuinely free, in exchange for your email address if you want to join the newsletter. You can unsubscribe at any time.

7. What money doesn't buy

This matters more to us than any of the above, so it gets its own section.

  • Recommendations are based on first-hand experience. If we haven't been somewhere or used something, we say that instead of pretending otherwise.

  • A commission doesn't change a ranking. The hotels at the top of a "best of" list are there because we think they're the best fit for the reader, not because they pay the highest rate.

  • Criticism stays in. A sponsor can't have a paragraph removed because it's unflattering.

  • Nothing here is written by AI pretending to be us. These are our own words, our own photographs and our family's experience of living in Barbados.

If you ever think a post reads like it was bought, tell us. We'd want to know.

8. Newsletter, Pinterest and social

The same rules apply everywhere:

  • Newsletters containing affiliate links say so at the top.

  • Sponsored emails are labelled "Ad" or "Paid partnership" in the subject line or the first line of the email.

  • Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest posts that are paid, gifted or affiliate-linked carry a clear label — a paid-partnership tag where the platform offers one, and the words "ad", "gifted" or "affiliate" where it doesn't. Hashtags buried in a block at the bottom don't count, so we don't use them for this.

9. The rules we follow

We aim to meet the strictest of the standards that apply to a Barbados-based blog with an international readership:

  • The US Federal Trade Commission's Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising (16 CFR Part 255), which require disclosures to be clear, conspicuous and placed where a reader can't miss them.

  • The UK CAP Code as enforced by the Advertising Standards Authority, and the Competition and Markets Authority's guidance on hidden advertising, which require paid content to be labelled up front.

  • Barbados consumer protection law, which prohibits misleading commercial practices.

  • Where these differ, we follow whichever asks for more disclosure.

10. Questions

If anything on this page is unclear, or you want to know whether a particular link or post is commercial, just ask.

Skip to Malou
Barbados
Email: skiptomalouuu@gmail.com