FlightLogic is free to use
There's no paywall, no subscription, and no account needed to read any review, ranking, or guide on FlightLogic. We'd rather be genuinely useful to every traveller than lock our best advice behind a fee. That means the site has to pay for itself another way — and we think you should know exactly how.
So how does FlightLogic make money?
Almost entirely through affiliate links. When you use one of our booking or application buttons — for example "Search British Airways fares from UK airports" or "Check BA Amex Premium Plus provider terms" — and you go on to book a trip or apply for a card, the partner may pay us a commission. It costs you nothing extra, and you get the same price or offer as going direct.
The order in which things happen matters. We research, test, and score first — based on what's best for the traveller — and only then do we add a commercial link where one is available. We do not decide what to recommend based on what pays. If the best airline or card in a category has no affiliate link, it still gets ranked first, and we'll happily send you off to book it earning nothing.
Doesn't earning commission compromise your reviews?
No — and this is the part we care about most. FlightLogic's rankings and scores are produced by a published, repeatable methodology: independent data sources, firsthand testing by named editors, and fixed category weights. A commercial deal cannot move a score by a single decimal point. The airline that objectively scores highest is ranked #1 whether it earns us money or not.
We'll be honest about where commercial reality does and doesn't reach: revenue can influence how often we're able to write about a topic, but it never influences what we say about it. Plenty of our highest-rated flights, lounges, and cards have no affiliate link behind them at all.
Affiliate links
Like other UK travel publishers, we sometimes use affiliate links — outbound links marked with an asterisk (*) that may earn us commission if you book a flight, apply for a card, or complete an action with a third party, at no extra cost to you. Affiliate income helps fund the site; it does not decide which airlines or cards we cover or how we rank them.
We follow UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP)
rules: commercial relationships are disclosed clearly before you click, using plain language and
the * label on paid links. For Google Search, affiliate and other paid outbound links use
rel="nofollow sponsored" (and open in a new tab where appropriate) so search engines
can identify compensated links. When a link takes you to a booking site or card issuer, your
contract is with that provider — not with FlightLogic.
How we flag affiliate links
We believe you should never have to guess. Paid outbound links are marked with an asterisk (*)
on the button or link text, explained in a disclosure box before commercial content, and noted
in the site header. Anchor text is always context-specific — for example Check BA Amex Premium Plus provider terms or Search Virgin Atlantic fares from UK airports — never generic phrases like "Click here"
or "Read more". Every paid link uses a direct href to the provider; we do not
rewrite destinations with JavaScript after page load.
In the page code, every affiliate link uses rel="nofollow sponsored". Our internal
links, reference links, and citations are never affiliate links.
And to be completely clear: using our link never costs you more than going direct. Commission is paid by the company from its own marketing budget, not added to your fare, room rate, or card.
DMCC Act 2024 — drip pricing
UK law (Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024) bans "drip pricing": showing a low headline price and adding mandatory fees later in checkout. The CMA expects the full payable amount upfront for consumer-facing price claims.
On FlightLogic, cached hotel estimates are labelled indicative nightly totals for a defined one-night window — not "from" or "base" rates that exclude unavoidable booking fees. When our build-time cache cannot confirm mandatory charges, we omit a numeric headline and send you to the partner checkout for the legally required full price. Ancillary blocks (insurance, parking, experiences) never show partial "starting from" figures unless the number is an all-in mandatory total.
Where our links come from
Our flight-search links are powered by metasearch partners such as Skyscanner. Credit card, hotel, and other travel links come through established affiliate networks (including Awin, Travelpayouts, and CJ) or directly from a company's own affiliate programme. We only ever link to the same public booking or application page you'd reach yourself — we don't route you somewhere worse to earn more.
Flight affiliate commissions are typically low (around 1–2%), so flight and lounge reviews also
surface vetted high-margin ancillaries — travel insurance, hotel stays, and bookable experiences —
in clearly labelled blocks marked data-nosnippet so search snippets stay editorial.
All outbound affiliate URLs are resolved at build time and rendered as plain anchor tags — we do not
use third-party scripts that obfuscate or swap link destinations in the browser.
Agentic AI and digital identity (roadmap)
FlightLogic publishes machine-readable endpoints at /api/v1/manifest.json
and ~800-token GEO chunks at /geo-chunks/manifest.json
so enterprise workflow tools (Microsoft Teams travel bots, zero-touch itinerary agents) can ingest
verified lounge, dining, and productivity data without scraping HTML.
As digital identity wallets scale for corporate travel, FlightLogic plans verifiable-credential hooks for agent-driven lounge and insurance bookings — one-click checkout with delegated corporate policy checks. This is not live yet; affiliate bookings today remain direct-to-partner via labelled outbound links.
What we never do
- No pay-for-placement. Companies cannot buy a higher ranking, a better score, or a featured slot.
- No pay-to-remove. No airline, hotel, or issuer can pay to have a critical review or low score taken down.
- No undisclosed freebies. We book and pay for the trips we review with cash or points. If anything is ever comped, it's disclosed on that specific review.
- No ghostwriting or AI-generated reviews. Every review carries a named human editor who took the trip.
- No selling your data. We don't sell your personal information to third parties. See our privacy policy.
How this differs from many travel sites
A lot of "best airline" and "best travel card" content online is ordered, quietly, by which company pays the most. FlightLogic is built the other way around: the ranking comes from the methodology, the commercial link is added afterwards, and we tell you when the top pick earns us nothing. That's a harder way to run a site — but it's the only version of FlightLogic worth reading.