Editorial standards
Affiliate Disclosure
Last revised 25 September 2026 · Reviewed each season
This page explains where money changes hands on Key West Vacation Center, and what that does and does not change about what you read. Last updated: 25 September 2026.
The short version
Some of the links in these guides earn us a commission when you book through them. Your price is the same either way, and no commission decides what appears in a guide.
How this site is funded
Key West Vacation Center is free to read, has no subscription and sells nothing of its own. Part of what keeps it running is affiliate commission, earned through Travelpayouts, an affiliate network connecting the site to hotel, flight, transfer and activity booking companies.
It is worth being exact about how that works here, because it is not the usual arrangement. We do not paste tagged affiliate links into articles. Travelpayouts runs a script that converts ordinary outbound links into commission-tracking ones as the page loads. So a link that looks entirely plain in the page can still earn us a commission, and the same link earns nothing for a reader who has refused the script.
The same script can also add things of its own to a guide: booking boxes, and small pop-up booking suggestions on some of the places a guide mentions. They are advertising too, and they are paid the same way. When you follow a link, it can also open a booking offer in the tab you were reading, with the guide reopened in a new tab. We do not place any of these by hand; the network decides where they appear.
Two consequences follow, and both are the reason this page is worded the way it is. We cannot list the paid links one by one, because which links are paid is decided by the network at the moment the page loads, not by us when the guide is written. And because we cannot list them, the notice at the top of every article is unconditional: assume an outbound booking link earns us a commission.
The commission is paid by the booking company out of its own margin. It does not add anything to your price, and booking through a link here costs exactly what booking direct would.
What it does not buy
No hotel, charter, restaurant or attraction pays to appear in a guide or to be left out of one, and none of them sees an article before it is published. We do not publish sponsored posts or guest articles placed for links. A guide is researched and written first; the monetising happens afterwards and automatically, to whatever links are already there.
Key West Vacation Center is independently published and is not affiliated with the City of Key West, the Monroe County Tourist Development Council or any hotel, operator or charter business on the island. It is not a booking agency and is not a party to any booking you make: that contract is between you and the company taking your money.
Earlier versions of the privacy policy said the guides carried no affiliate links. That stopped being true when the Travelpayouts script was added, and the privacy policy, the terms and the about page were corrected on 25 September 2026 to say so.
What this means for your data
The Travelpayouts script sits in the Advertising group in this site’s cookie settings. Until that group is allowed it does not load at all: on a first visit from the EU, the UK or any of the other countries listed in the privacy policy nothing of it runs until you say yes, and in the United States it stays off until you answer the bar at the bottom of the page. In Canada and the countries where a notice is enough it starts on arrival, and the same settings switch it off.
When it runs it receives your IP address and browser details and reports to Travelpayouts how the page is used, under a session identifier kept in a cookie called am_user_session that lapses 30 minutes after you stop reading. The privacy policy lists what those reports contain. If you follow one of its links, Travelpayouts and the booking company you land on set identifiers of their own so that a booking made afterwards is credited here. We are never given your name, your contact details, your travel dates or your payment details — what comes back to us is a count of clicks and, sometimes, the fact that a booking happened.
You can change your mind at any time from the Cookie settings link in the footer (in the United States it reads Do not sell or share my personal information). The script stops running and its session cookie lapses within half an hour; anything Travelpayouts or a booking site set on their own domains is cleared in your browser rather than from here. Your answer is kept in a first-party cookie, cookie_consent_8753de. Refusing costs you nothing: every guide on Key West Vacation Center is readable in full either way, and the links still work, at the same price.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you think a link has not been disclosed properly, say so through the contact page. Corrections get made.