How Go With Rosie Makes Money: The Full Accounting
Go With Rosie is free for families and earns money one way: a commission when you book a hotel through us. No paid placements, no sponsored rankings, no selling your data. Venue rankings come from the Rosie Score, which is built on family review data and cannot be bought. Here is the full accounting, including what the large booking sites publish about their own models.
How does Go With Rosie make money?
When you book a hotel through Go With Rosie, the hotel pays a commission. That is the entire revenue model. There is no subscription, no premium tier that unhides better results, no fee at checkout, and no version of the product where paying us changes what you see.
Everything else stays free: the venue scores, the destination guides, the itinerary templates, the trip planner, and the ability to change every recommendation we make. We do not charge families for planning, and we do not intend to start.
The only lever we have to make more money is helping more families book trips they are happy with. If a recommendation is bad, we lose. That is the alignment we wanted.
What do the big booking sites do differently?
Large travel sites also earn commissions, and there is nothing wrong with that. The difference is what else they sell. Each of these programs is published by the company that runs it, in its own words.
| Company | Can a property pay for better placement? | Program name and published description |
|---|---|---|
| Booking.com | Yes | Preferred Partner Program, which the company says gives "greater visibility in search results" for "a small increase in commission." Visibility Booster lets a property raise its commission on a slider to rank higher |
| Expedia Group | Yes | Accelerator, described as a way to "boost your position in search results in a few simple clicks," and TravelAds Sponsored Listings, which buys "premium placements in search results." Expedia states that properties in the top 20 sort positions on Expedia and Hotels.com get 80% of clicks |
| Tripadvisor | Yes | Sponsored Placements, sold on a cost-per-click basis, which the company says "appear in high visibility locations, including on top of search results, on local competitors' pages, and more" |
| Go With Rosie | No | There is no program to buy. Placement comes from the Rosie Score and nothing else |
Neither Booking.com nor Expedia publishes a standard hotel commission rate. What their audited filings show is the blended take: Booking Holdings kept about 14.5% of the $186.1 billion in gross bookings it processed in 2025, and Expedia Group about 12.3% of $119.6 billion. Those figures cover every product they sell, including low-margin flights, so hotel commissions sit above the blend.
We are not claiming those companies do anything improper. They run large marketplaces and they sell visibility inside them. What that means for you is simply that the order of results on a big travel site is partly a paid order, and there is no way for you to tell which part.
What happens to the information you share about your family?
It shapes your recommendations and goes nowhere else. Go With Rosie does not sell user data and does not share it with advertising partners for targeted advertising. Your kids' ages, your travel dates, and the places you are considering are not a product we sell.
This is worth stating plainly because the published policies elsewhere read differently. Expedia Group's privacy statement says it "may disclose your personal data to our third-party marketing partners for targeted advertising." Tripadvisor's US privacy policy says it may "sell" or "share" categories of personal information with "business partners, social media websites, advertising networks, data aggregators" for interest-based advertising, and it offers a "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" opt-out. Both are legal, disclosed, and standard in the industry. Neither is something we do.
Every family deserves a travel companion that is on their side, and a business model you can read in one paragraph.
What does a score you cannot buy actually look like?
The Rosie Score rates venues 0 to 100 across six dimensions: age appropriateness, safety and supervision, educational value, weather independence, physical accessibility, and cost and value. Above 80 earns an A+. The Chicago Children's Museum, our first Rosie Approved venue, scored 81, with age appropriateness at 88.
Those numbers come from family review data, which is the reason the scoring system exists at all. We read 50,000 venue reviews and found that 3.5% mentioned children and 0.3% mentioned a specific family amenity such as a high chair, a changing table, or a stroller-accessible entrance. Across the 33 million US households with children in the country (Census Bureau), that is a lot of families planning trips from reviews written by people who were not traveling with kids.
A venue cannot raise that score by spending money, because there is no mechanism to spend money on. You can see the output in our Chicago Children's Museum review, our Orlando beyond Disney guide, where a full family day comes in around $310, and our 10 under-the-radar family destinations.
What are we doing with the money as we grow?
Before Go With Rosie earned a dollar of revenue, we gave a launch family a $500 travel credit. It was a small thing at the size we were, and it was the shape we wanted the company to keep: money coming in means families getting out.
We are a small, tight-knit team, mostly Wisconsin-based, and the commitment as revenue grows is to keep putting a share of it back into the families and the community helping us build this. We would rather tell you what we have actually done than announce a program we have not funded yet, so this section will get longer over time or it will not have earned the space.
Why does any of this matter when you are picking a hotel?
Because when a recommendation might be paid, every recommendation carries an asterisk, and you end up doing the research anyway. That is the tax the current setup puts on parents, and it lands hardest on the person in the household doing the planning.
Our argument for why generic recommendations fail families is laid out in full in why family travel recommendations don't work. The short version is that a scoring system only means something if nobody can pay to move up it. Start with Go With Rosie, enter your kids' ages, and check the scores against a place you already know. That is the fastest way to find out whether we are telling the truth.
Questions families ask about how Go With Rosie makes money
How does Go With Rosie make money?
Go With Rosie earns a commission when a family books a hotel through the site. That is the only revenue source. There are no subscriptions, no premium tiers, no paid venue placements, no sponsored rankings, and no data sales. Planning, venue scores, guides, and templates are all free.
Is Go With Rosie really free?
Yes, and free for everything a family plans with it: venue scores, destination guides, itinerary templates, and the trip planner. There is no paid tier that unhides better results. The only money that changes hands is a hotel commission after you book.
Does Go With Rosie sell user data?
No. Go With Rosie does not sell user data and does not share it with advertising partners for targeted advertising. Your kids' ages, travel dates, and saved trips shape your recommendations inside the product and are not packaged for third parties.
Can a venue pay to rank higher on Go With Rosie?
No, because there is no program to buy. Ranking comes from the Rosie Score, which is built from family review data across six dimensions. By comparison, Booking.com, Expedia Group, and Tripadvisor all publish paid visibility programs that let a property improve its position in search results.
How is Go With Rosie different from Expedia or Booking.com?
Large booking sites are built for all travelers and sell placement inside their results. Go With Rosie is built only for families, scores venues across six family-specific dimensions including age appropriateness and physical accessibility, and sells no placement at all. The tradeoff is a smaller catalog with far more family detail.
What does Go With Rosie score venues on?
Six dimensions: age appropriateness, safety and supervision, educational value, weather independence, physical accessibility, and cost and value. Signals such as high chairs, changing facilities, wait times, and noise levels feed those dimensions. A score above 80 out of 100 earns an A+.
Why should I trust a company that earns booking commissions?
Because the commission does not change what you see. Placement comes from the Rosie Score, and there is no product a hotel can buy to move up it. Check it yourself: look up a venue you already know well and see whether the Rosie Score matches your experience. That test costs nothing and settles it faster than any promise we make here.