This page explains where money changes hands on Shanghai Tourism Guide, and what that does and does not change about what you read. Last updated: 20 September 2026.
The short version
Some of the outbound links in these guides earn us a commission when you book through them. Your price is the same either way, and no commission has ever decided what appears in a guide.
How this site is funded
Shanghai Tourism Guide 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, rail 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 may earn nothing for a reader who has refused the script.
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 business has paid to appear in a guide or to be left out of one. We accept no payment, gift or hosted stay in exchange for coverage, and nobody sees an article before it is published. The writing is finished before any link in it is monetised, which is the order that matters.
Shanghai Tourism Guide is independently published. It is not a Chinese tourism body, is not affiliated with any government agency, hotel group, tour operator or booking platform, and does not speak for the city. It is not a booking agency and is not a party to any booking you make.
Earlier versions of these pages said the site carried no affiliate links at all. That stopped being true when the Travelpayouts script was added, and this page, the terms and the about page were corrected on 20 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, so 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; in the United States it stays off until you answer the bar at the bottom of the page. When it does load it receives your IP address and browser details, as any service your browser connects to does.
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. What that records is the booking, not what you read on this site. 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: the scripts stop running, and the analytics cookies this site can reach are cleared. Travelpayouts stores nothing here under a name this site can see, so anything it has already set on its own domains has to be cleared in your browser rather than from this page. Your answer is kept in a first-party cookie, cookie_consent_2535f1. Refusing costs you nothing: every guide on Shanghai Tourism Guide is readable in full either way.
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.