Affiliate disclosure — Lighthouses of Australia

Lighthouses of Australia participates in affiliate programs. When we link to a third-party travel booking site and you make a purchase, we may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. This page explains exactly how that works and what it means for the content on this site.

How affiliate links work

Some of the outbound links on this site — specifically, the "see accommodation in…" links that appear on individual lighthouse pages alongside location and access information — are affiliate links. When you click one of those links, a small tag is added to your browsing session. If you then complete a booking on the destination site within a set window (typically 30 days), the destination site pays us a small commission out of their own margin. You pay the exact same price you would have paid without clicking our link.

We receive no payment for clicks, visits, or traffic volume. Commission only flows if you actually book a stay, and only on the destination site's standard terms. If you cancel your booking, no commission is paid.

Which links are affiliate links

On this site, the only affiliate links are accommodation booking links that appear inside the Visiting section on individual lighthouse pages. Every affiliate link is clearly marked with a disclosure statement directly adjacent to it. Affiliate links carry rel="sponsored" attributes in the page source, consistent with Google's recommended markup for monetised outbound links.

All other links on this site — to Wikipedia, to Google Maps, to government websites, to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, to state parks services, between our own pages — are editorial and unpaid. We receive no compensation for them.

Our current affiliate partners

At the time of writing, we are a participant in the following affiliate program:

• Booking.com Australia, via the Awin affiliate network. Booking.com is one of the largest online accommodation booking platforms in the world and includes hotels, motels, apartments, holiday homes, boats, hostels and unusual accommodations across every Australian state and territory.

We may add additional partners over time. If we do, this page will be updated to reflect the full list, and any new affiliate placements will be clearly disclosed at the point of the link, the same way Booking.com links are today.

Does this affect our editorial content?

No. The catalogue of lighthouses on this site is complete — we aim to document every lighthouse on the Australian coast regardless of whether there's any bookable accommodation nearby. Our decisions about which lighthouses to include, how to describe them, and how to present their history and heritage status are not influenced in any way by affiliate commissions.

In particular:

• We do not prioritise or promote lighthouses near areas with bookable accommodation over remote lighthouses with none. Every listed lighthouse gets a page of equivalent depth and quality.
• We do not recommend specific properties, hotel chains, or booking choices. The affiliate link is a generic search for accommodation in the nearest town — the user sees exactly the same results they would see if they typed the town name into Booking.com themselves.
• We do not write reviews of accommodation, because we do not have the editorial infrastructure to verify quality at that scale. If you want accommodation reviews, use the reviews on Booking.com itself or on a dedicated reviews site.

If a lighthouse has no accommodation hub within a reasonable driving distance — for example, offshore reef lights, uninhabited islands, or remote headland sites — its page simply omits the accommodation link. No affiliate link is added where it wouldn't be genuinely useful.

What "small commission" actually means

Commission rates for Booking.com affiliate links are typically in the range of 4–6% of the accommodation cost, paid after the booking completes. If you book a A$200-per-night stay through one of our links, and keep that booking, we may receive somewhere around A$8–A$12. This is paid by Booking.com out of their own service fee — it's not added to your bill.

We mention this explicitly because we think it's useful for you to know the order of magnitude. It's not a secret, and it's not enormous. Across the network of lighthouse pages, affiliate revenue is a small supplementary income stream that helps fund the hosting, domain and research costs for the site. It does not replace the need for the site to be editorially useful on its own merits.

Your rights and alternatives

You are under absolutely no obligation to use our affiliate links. If you prefer not to, you can:

• Visit Booking.com directly by typing the URL into your browser
• Use a different accommodation booking service entirely (Stayz, Airbnb, Expedia, direct from the property)
• Book directly with the accommodation provider by phone or email

You will get the same price through any of these routes. The content on this site — lighthouse histories, heritage information, photographs, location details — remains freely available to you whether you book through our links or not.

Compliance and disclosure standards

This disclosure policy is designed to meet or exceed:

• The IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) affiliate disclosure guidelines for publishers
• Google's Search Essentials guidance on sponsored outbound links (use of rel="sponsored")
• The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's guidance on transparency in online commercial arrangements
• The Awin affiliate network's publisher terms and conditions

If you believe we have fallen short of any of these standards on any specific page, please contact us and we will fix it.

Contact

For any questions about this policy or our affiliate arrangements, contact hello@decisionlab.com.au with "Affiliate disclosure" in the subject line. This policy was last updated on 22 April 2026.