Affiliate Disclosure
Some links on this site earn us a commission when you buy through them. You never pay more because of it. This page says which ones, and the rules we hold ourselves to.
Who we partner with
Klook, for Japanese rail passes, airport transfers and attraction tickets. Ubigi and Holafly, for travel eSIMs. That is the complete list. Every affiliate link on this site is labelled where it appears, and routed through a /go/ address so we can see which ones readers actually find useful.
Our eSIM guide names four providers as equals and tells you to buy on price. Two of them, Ubigi and Holafly, pay us; Airalo and Saily pay us nothing. Rather than link only the two that pay and leave the others as plain text — which would quietly steer you toward them — all four are linked, in the order they were already in, and only the two paying ones are marked as sponsored. We would rather monetise less than shape the page around who pays.
The rules
- Commission never changes a recommendation. Not what we recommend, not the order we list things in, and not the output of any calculator on this site.
- We only link to things we already recommended. Every affiliate link here points at a product this site named and recommended before any commission existed.
- The free answer stays the recommended answer when it is the right one. Mobile Suica in Apple Wallet is free and we still call it the best option. A station ticket machine sells an IC card for a refundable ¥500 deposit and we still send you there. Point-to-point tickets beat the rail pass on most first trips, and our JR Pass calculator still says so — it only shows a link to buy the pass when the arithmetic says the pass wins.
What we turned down
We could be paid for IC cards. We do not link them, because the version that pays us is the version our own IC card guide documents as worse — no refund of the leftover balance, against a regular card's refundable deposit. Linking it would mean rewriting honest advice to suit a commission, so the category is simply absent.
More
See also our Privacy Policy, Terms of Service and Refund Policy.