A marketplace is a set of rules, not a list.

Booking a straightforward holiday has never been easier. Booking anything complicated — a multi-city route, a group, an incentive trip, a wedding, a wellness retreat that has to actually be quiet — has barely improved in twenty years. You still end up emailing eleven companies, receiving four replies in four different formats, and having no idea which of them legally exists.

Meanwhile the companies that do this work well — the DMC in Göreme with its own guides, the charter operator in Split, the retreat organiser on the western Algarve — spend their marketing budget fighting for attention against aggregators that resell them.

ETC exists to shorten that distance: one brief from the traveller, a small number of well-matched, verified companies, and offers structured so they can actually be compared.

1. Verify before listing, not after complaints. A directory that lists first and checks later is a lead-gen business wearing a trust badge.
2. Publish the ranking model. Companies deserve to know why they are losing. The six weighted factors are on the professionals page.
3. Cap distribution at 8 companies. Uncapped distribution feels generous and destroys reply rates on both sides within a season.
4. Label every sponsored placement. Always, and never by silently reordering organic results.
5. Protect new supply. A deliberate fairness term gives lead share to companies that have received few recently. A marketplace that lets ten companies absorb everything stops being a marketplace.
6. Ask for the minimum access. Creator integrations request read-only analytics and nothing else. A permission never granted cannot be abused if we are breached.
7. Make the narrow claim. Verification means registered, licensed, insured and referenced. Not “trusted”, not “guaranteed”.

These are published so they can be held against us. If you find us breaking one, tell us — and if we cannot defend it, we will change it or stop claiming it.

Travellers pay nothing, so it is fair to ask who does. Travel companies pay subscriptions for lead volume and profile features; bookings completed through the platform carry an 8–12% commission; featured placement is sold separately and always labelled; creator campaigns carry a 10% platform fee.

We say this plainly because the alternative — an unexplained free service — trains people to assume their data is the product. It is not. We do not sell traveller data, and companies see only what a traveller chose to include in their request.