About & policies

Disclosures

How myeasttn.com makes money, how paid links and placements are labeled, and the rules that keep them from changing what we write.

The short version

The guides are free to read. Some links on myeasttn.com earn us money: if you buy or book through them, we may get a sale or a commission. It doesn’t change the price you pay, and no one pays us to change what a guide says.

Shop and affiliate links

Where the money comes from today:

• Our own shop — prints and merch at myeasttennessee.printful.me ↗, made and shipped by Printful. Boxes labeled “From our shop” link here.
• Print partners — prints, canvas and framed versions of our photos on Fine Art America ↗ and Zazzle. When you buy, we earn part of the sale.
• Labeled shop boxes — small “From our shop” boxes beside some guides. They’re always labeled and always point to our own work.

Lodging and ticket links

Where-to-stay and things-to-do sections may link to booking partners (for example, vacation-rental, hotel or ticket sites). Those links may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. When a booking partner’s links are on the site, we name that partner on this page. Our picks are based on location and trip fit — not on who pays — and we never show live rates: prices live on the booking site.

Advertising

myeasttn.com does not show display ads today. If we add them, they will come from an advertising network, not from businesses we write about, and these rules apply:

• Ads are visibly set apart from the guide and labeled as advertising.
• The network chooses which ads appear; we don’t endorse the products in them.
• Advertisers have no say in what we cover or what a guide says.
• Before the first ad appears, we’ll update our privacy policy to name the network and explain its cookies.

Sponsors and paid placements

We don’t have sponsors or paid listings today. If a local business or organization ever pays for a placement — a featured listing, a category sponsorship or a newsletter slot — it will be:

• labeled “Sponsor” or “Partner” right where it appears — never “Verified”, “Recommended” or “Best”;
• kept separate from our own picks, which are never for sale;
• marked rel="sponsored" in the page code, as search engines ask.

Sponsors and partners don’t review, edit or approve guides before they publish, and paying us doesn’t buy a good review or keep a bad one off the site.

How to spot paid links

Shop, affiliate and partner links are labeled on the page (for example “From our shop” or “Where to stay”) and marked rel="sponsored noopener" in the page code. On any page with affiliate or sponsor links, a short disclosure line appears above the first one. Links to the National Park Service, state parks, TVA, local governments and news outlets are never paid.

Page-level disclosure (standard wording)

This is the line we place above the first affiliate or sponsor link on a page:

For a sponsored placement, we label the item itself: Sponsor — “Paid placement. Sponsors don’t review or change our guides.”

Questions

Email [email protected]. See also our editorial rules.

Last updated October 31, 2026.

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