Affiliate disclosure

What counts as an affiliate link here

Every tour card, every booking button and every availability panel on this site is an affiliate link to GetYourGuide, a licensed online travel agency. They carry our partner id so a booking can be attributed here. Ordinary links between pages of this site are not affiliate links, and there are no others: no display advertising, no sponsored placements, no paid reviews, and no operator has bought a position, a phrase or a star.

Those booking links live in the page bodies only. The navigation and the footer link to nothing but other pages of this site, which is a deliberate rule and is explained on the about page alongside the other one — that no page here prints a price.

The thing this disclosure exists to tell you

The most-read page on this site earns us nothing at all. The tip-based “free” walking tour is what most people typing these words are looking for, it is a legitimate and often very good product, and it is not sold on the platform we link to. We could have written that page to funnel every reader towards a booking. Instead it explains the model honestly, says plainly that we cannot sell you one, and sends people who want that product off to arrange it themselves. It is the cornerstone page here, and every time somebody reads it and acts on it we earn less rather than more.

The same applies to walking the route without a guide. The classic line runs roughly a kilometre from the station to the Royal Palace, the centre is unusually walkable, the Akershus Fortress grounds are free to walk through and open daily, and a reasonably curious person with a map can do the whole thing for nothing. We say so on its own page instead of burying it.

What it does not change

Not the ratings, not the ordering, and not what we tell people to avoid. The clearest proof is that the lowest-rated of the six gets a full review page rather than a quiet omission, and that the highest-rated one is written up with its sample size in the first paragraph every time it appears — a 5.0 from 101 reviews is not the same claim as a 4.7 from 1,710, and we refuse to print one without the other.

The warnings cost us bookings and stay in anyway. One of the six is guided in German only, behind an English listing title, and we say so on every page it appears on rather than letting an English speaker book it by accident. The evening folklore walk is age 13 and over only and is not wheelchair accessible, and that goes at the top of the page rather than in a footnote.

What we are not selling

We are not a tour operator and not a guiding company. We have no connection to any of the companies whose walks are described here, we never name them, and we cannot put you on a walk, hold a place or refund one. If any page here ever reads as though we can, it is wrong and we want to know: contact us. More on who writes this and why: about this site.