Affiliate disclosure
Short version: the booking buttons on this site are affiliate links to GetYourGuide. If you book through one, we get paid. You do not pay more.
What earns a commission
Every link on this site that says "check live availability and prices on GetYourGuide" points at the official listing for the Waitomo Glowworm Caves 45-Minute Experience, operated by Discover Waitomo, and carries our partner identifier. If you book after clicking one, GetYourGuide pays us a percentage of their commission. The price you pay is the same as if you had gone to GetYourGuide directly and typed the tour name in yourself.
Those links are marked in the page code with rel="sponsored", which is the standard way of telling search engines a link is commercial. They also open in a new tab.
What does not earn anything
| Link type | Do we earn? |
|---|---|
| GetYourGuide booking links | Yes. This is the only revenue source on the site. |
| Links to waitomo.com, the operator's own site | No. Those are citations, so you can check a fact against the source. |
| Links to Viator or Tripadvisor | No. We cite them as review sources. We are not a Viator affiliate. |
| Links to Spellbound, RealNZ, black water rafting or other operators | No. Those exist because they are sometimes the better answer. |
| Links to Wikipedia, NIWA, DOC, Nature or Tourism New Zealand | No. Those back up specific facts. |
That last row is the one worth noticing. We recommend Ruakuri Cave, Spellbound and the free Ruakuri Bush Walk on several pages, and we earn nothing from any of them. If the honest answer to a reader's question is "book something we do not get paid for", that is what the page says.
What the commission does not buy
It does not buy a rating. The 4.5 stars and 5,623 reviews quoted on this site are the operator's own current figures on GetYourGuide, and they are printed as they stand. It does not buy silence about the complaints either. The most repeated criticism of this tour, that the glowworm boat section runs perhaps five to ten minutes of the 45, appears on the homepage, in the FAQ and in the worth-it guide, because a reader who books without knowing that is a reader we have failed.
No operator pays us to be featured, no operator reviews our copy before it goes live, and nobody has editorial input into this site except the people who write it.
Who we are and are not
We are not the cave operator. The Waitomo Glowworm Caves are owned by the descendants of the original Māori owners through the Ruapuha Uekaha Hapū Trust, following the return of the caves in 1989, and the tours are operated by Discover Waitomo. We do not sell tickets, hold bookings or issue refunds. Everything about your actual reservation goes through GetYourGuide or the operator.
More on the sourcing and what we refuse to publish is on the about page. Questions about any of this can go to our inbox.
This disclosure is provided in line with the United States Federal Trade Commission's guidance on endorsements and testimonials, and appears in the footer of every page on the site.