Why our affiliate links don't influence your alerts
Sparkfare may earn a commission if you buy through links on this site, at no extra cost to you. Read our disclosure.
We say commissions don't influence which flights get flagged as deals. That's easy to claim and hard to actually verify from the outside, so it's worth explaining why it's true rather than just asserting it.
The ranking math has no commission input
A route is flagged a deal purely from its own price history — the cheapest fare in our latest search data compared against that exact route's trailing 30-day median, gated on a minimum history requirement. Full mechanics in how we rank deals. There's no field anywhere in that calculation for "how much this route pays us" — the ranking script doesn't have commission data to weight toward in the first place, structurally, not by a policy someone could quietly override.
Featured destinations are the honest exception, and they're labeled as such
Destinations like Marrakech, Petra, and Cusco are always featured on the board regardless of price, and never carry a "deal" badge — a deliberate curation choice about which cities are interesting, not a hidden commission play. We've written about the full grouping of destinations specifically so this exception is documented, not buried.
Where commissions actually show up instead
Entirely downstream, on the Away Mode side: booking links and Away Mode partner links can earn a commission, always disclosed before the link, never baked into whether a flight gets shown or how it's badged. Those are two separate systems in the codebase, not one system with a policy switch.