You have been sending guests to the same trattoria for two years. The owner knows your name, occasionally puts your people at a decent table, and has never paid you anything. At some point the thought arrives that this could be an arrangement rather than a habit.
It can be. The part most hosts get wrong is not the idea: it is walking into that conversation without having decided which of three quite different deals they are proposing, and leaving without anything written down. Six months later there is a disagreement about how many covers came from you, nobody can settle it, and a relationship that used to be pleasant becomes slightly awkward instead.
This article covers the three shapes a local recommendation deal takes, how to choose between them, what belongs in the written agreement even when the agreement is an email, how to have the approach conversation without overselling yourself, and what you owe the guest by way of disclosure.
What You Are Actually Offering
Start by being accurate about the size of your channel, because the business owner will find out anyway.
A three-property host sends, at most, a few hundred guest-parties a year. That is not a media channel, and calling it one is the fastest way to lose credibility. What you do have is unusually good demand: visitors who are in the area for three to seven days, have no local habits, are actively deciding where to spend money, and ask you directly rather than searching. A recommendation given in answer to a question outperforms an advert given to nobody in particular: that is the whole basis of the business case for monetising your local influence.
The other thing you have is timing. You know when your guests arrive, how long they are staying and whether it is an anniversary or four friends on bikes. A business cannot buy that targeting, and it is why the recommendation converts. The mechanics of that timing are covered in sending proactive local recommendations at the right moment.
What you do not have is guaranteed volume, and you should say so out loud in the first meeting. Occupancy moves, guests do what they want, and a bad August is a bad August for both of you.
Three Shapes That Work
Nearly every workable arrangement is one of these three, or a hybrid of two.
Flat monthly placement. The business pays a fixed monthly amount to be your named recommendation in a category: the bike hire, the coffee place, the one restaurant you send people to on their first night. Nothing is tracked or reconciled. Both sides know exactly what the month costs and what it buys. It suits businesses with capacity to fill and a habit of paying for marketing: bike and board hire, tour operators, spas, transfer companies, restaurants with quiet midweek covers.
Per-referral commission. A percentage of the booking value, or a flat amount per party, paid on guests who arrive through you. It is the fairest of the three and the one owners recognise instantly, and it only functions where something is booked rather than walked into. Tours, boat trips, airport transfers, cooking classes, restaurants that take reservations through a platform: all trackable. A café with a till and no booking system is not, no matter how good the intention.
A guest-facing discount, with no money moving. The business gives your guests a standing benefit (ten per cent, a welcome drink, a held table until 21:00) and you give the recommendation. You are paid in guest experience rather than cash. This is the lowest-friction version, the one an owner-operated business will agree to in a single conversation, and for many hosts it stays the right answer permanently.
Hybrids are common and sensible: a small monthly placement plus a guest discount, or a commission that converts to a flat fee once counting costs more than it collects.
Matching the Shape to the Business
| Model | Your admin | Predictability | Disclosure burden | Worth doing when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flat monthly placement | Lowest once agreed: one invoice, one renewal conversation a year | Highest: the same amount whether or not guests go | Highest; it is paid placement and should read as such | You have steady volume, one obvious winner in a category, and a partner with capacity to fill |
| Per-referral commission | Highest: codes, counting, reconciling, chasing | Lowest: moves with occupancy and with what guests feel like doing | High, and clearest when the guest can see a code | The partner can genuinely track a booking and the value per referral is worth the counting |
| Guest-facing discount | Low: agree the offer, check it is being honoured | Nothing in cash, so nothing to forecast | Lowest, though you still answer honestly if asked | The business will not pay, your guests gain something real, and you want the relationship without the admin |
The column that decides it in practice is the admin one. Per-referral commission looks like the fairest model on paper and is the one that most often quietly dies, because somebody has to count, and at small volumes nobody wants to. Flat placement survives because it asks nothing of either party after the first conversation. The discount survives because there is nothing to survive.
The Approach Conversation
Bring one honest number and the smaller version of it. "Around a hundred and sixty stays a year across three flats, and most parties ask me for a dinner recommendation at least once" is a sentence an owner can price. "We send hundreds of guests" is a sentence that collapses in month two when four covers turn up, and the damage is not the four covers: it is that you are now someone who exaggerates, and the second conversation never happens.
Say specifically what you will do: name them first when a guest asks for dinner, put them at the top of the guidebook in their category, mention them in the arrival message. Vague promises about "featuring" a business tell the owner nothing.
Then ask what they actually want, because it is frequently not more customers. Restaurants generally do not need another Saturday; they need Tuesday. A deal that fills the nights they cannot fill is worth more to them than a percentage of the nights they can, and a host who opens with "where would you want me to send people, and when" is having a different conversation from everyone else who walks in.
Go to the owner rather than the Saturday manager, propose a three-month trial with a date to review it, and do not ask for money before you have sent anybody. The order that works is: recommend for a season, then formalise. A host who has already delivered is negotiating from something real. The wider version of this, which businesses to approach and how to think about the portfolio of them, sits in the guide to earning referral income from local recommendations.
What Goes in Writing, Even When It Is an Email
You do not need a lawyer for a €60-a-month placement. You do need a written record, because the point is not enforcement: it is that in nine months one of you will misremember, and there will be something to look at instead of two confident recollections.
An email with these points, replied to with "agreed", is enough for most small partnerships:
- Who the parties are. The legal entity on their side, not just the trading name over the door, and the person who has authority to agree it.
- What counts as a referral. The single most argued-about line in the whole agreement, dealt with in the next section.
- Who tracks it, how, and who produces the count. Name the mechanism (a code, a booking link, a note at the till) and who reports to whom, by when.
- The rate, and what it applies to. A percentage of what: the food bill, the total including drinks, before or after tax, before or after service. Ambiguity here is a dispute with a delay fuse.
- When money moves. Monthly in arrears, by a stated date, against an invoice. Say who raises the invoice: this is income and it belongs in your books.
- Term and exit. Either side out on thirty days' written notice, with whatever is owed settled. Nobody is trapped, so nobody has to have a difficult conversation to leave.
- Your right to stop recommending, immediately, for any reason. This is the clause that protects your guests. If standards slip, you stop sending people that day and the payments stop from that date, without the two questions becoming one argument.
- What happens if the business changes hands. The agreement ends when the owner sells, and the new owner can start a fresh one if they want to. Without this line, a deal you made with a chef you trusted quietly becomes a deal with a stranger.
- Disclosure. State that you will tell guests an arrangement exists. Agreeing it up front stops it landing later as a surprise that the partner takes badly.
- Guest data. You are not handing over names, phone numbers or email addresses. Guests arrive with a code or a mention; the partner's records are their own.
The Attribution Rule Is the Argument You Will Actually Have
Every dispute in a referral arrangement is the same dispute: whether a particular guest counts.
The couple who booked through your code counts. The couple who mentioned your flat at the door probably counts. The couple who heard you say the name, looked it up on Google, and booked directly: the partner's system shows an organic booking and you know perfectly well where it came from. Multiply that by a season and you have a gap between two honest counts that neither side can close.
Define four things before this happens. The unit: a party, not a head, so a table of six is one referral. The window: within the stay, not three months later. The evidence: what has to exist for it to count, and who records it. And the tie-break: if the counts disagree, whose number is used, or whether you simply split the difference and move on.
Expect undercounting, and price for it. Verbal attribution is systematically low because guests forget, staff are busy at the door, and nobody prompts. If your rate assumes the count is complete, you will spend the relationship feeling short-changed. If it assumes the count is partial, the arrangement holds. What the count is actually worth, and how to measure it on your side rather than theirs, is the subject of measuring whether your guest recommendations convert, and the restaurant-specific mechanics are in how hosts earn commission from restaurant and experience recommendations.
Book a fifteen-minute call once a month for the first three months. Most attribution arguments are actually reconciliation arguments that were left too long.
Telling the Guest
A guest is entitled to know that a recommendation is paid for, and in the European Union this is not a matter of taste.
EU consumer protection law has for years treated commercial practices that hide a commercial intent as misleading, and editorial-looking content that is in fact paid placement is the textbook example. The exact obligations depend on your member state's implementation, on the shape of the arrangement, and on whether money or only a benefit moves, so check the current national guidance, and take advice if the sums are material. Booking platforms have their own rules about promoting third-party services to guests, and those change; verify before you build a process around them.
The practical version is one sentence, in the guidebook and wherever the recommendation is given, written like a person rather than a legal notice: "We have arrangements with a few of the places on this list. They are on it because we would send our own family, and we would tell you if that ever stopped being true."
That sentence costs you almost nothing. A guest who learns about the arrangement from you and still trusts your taste is a guest who takes the recommendation. A guest who works it out for themselves, from a discount code with your flat's name in it, or from an owner who mentions it, discounts everything else you have told them, including the check-in instructions.
Where This Is Not Worth Doing
At three or four properties, the money is small and the admin is not.
Take an illustrative case, with numbers you should replace with your own: two partners at €50 a month each is €1,200 a year before you price your own time, and the monthly reconciliation, the annual renewal conversations and the re-approach when one of them sells will eat several hours a month. Per-referral deals at a few euros a party are worse on that measure, not better. The arithmetic only starts to move at portfolio scale, with concentrated demand going to a small number of partners.
Which leaves the honest reason many hosts should do this anyway: the guest experience. A table held until nine on a Saturday in August, a bike delivered to the door, ten per cent that a guest did not expect: those show up in reviews and in repeat bookings, and they are worth more to a small operation than the commission ever will be. If that is your real motive, the guest-discount model is the right one and you can skip the invoicing entirely.
Three more things to stay sceptical about. A paid partner slowly becomes a worse recommendation, and the drift is too gradual to notice from inside: review partners on how they treated your guests, never on what they paid. Commission income is income, so it has tax and possibly VAT consequences, particularly across borders; an email agreement is not advice and an accountant is cheaper than a correction. And your reputation now carries their bad night: when the kitchen is off, the guest blames the person who sent them.
On Welco specifically: it can carry the recommendation into the conversation where the guest is already asking, in the guest's own language, and it can carry your disclosure line with it. It does not sign agreements, count covers at a till, reconcile what you are owed, or operate any kind of partner marketplace. There is no billing relationship between Welco and your local businesses, and the commercial side of this stays entirely yours.
The Operational Picture
The deal is the easy part. What makes a local partnership survive its second year is that both sides wrote down what counts, agreed how to leave, and told the guest the truth. Welco's part is narrow: making sure the recommendation actually reaches the guest at the moment they ask, in a language they read, rather than sitting in a guidebook nobody opened. If that delivery step is the weak one in your setup, request a demo and try it against your own properties.