Editorial independence

Atlas Festoria's job is to be a trustworthy field guide for festival beginners. When someone is choosing where to spend a thousand dollars or more on their first festival weekend, they are trusting our beginner scores, vibe tags, and Watch Outs to be honest.

The moment a reader suspects a recommendation was paid for, that trust is gone — and unlike a lineup, it does not come back next year. This policy locks the wall between commerce and editorial before the first affiliate link ships, so the rules are set when the stakes are low.

Every surface on the site is either Editorial or Commercial. Nothing is both.

Editorial includes beginner-friendliness scores, vibe tags, Watch Outs, short and long descriptions, quiz logic and results, Field Notes and Scouted reviews, Similar Festivals logic, and state or region rankings. Commercial relationships may never influence content, ordering, scoring, tagging, inclusion, or exclusion.

Commercial includes Featured Festivals placements, affiliate ticket links, future sponsored listings, and newsletter sponsorships. Those surfaces are always clearly labeled, visually distinct, and confined to designated slots.

When we use affiliate ticket links, they point to primary ticket sellers wherever available. Resale links are a fallback only, and are labeled as resale when used.

Whether a festival's tickets carry an affiliate link has zero effect on its score, tags, description, quiz eligibility, or ranking.

Any page with an affiliate link will show a clear disclosure near the link — not buried in a footer. The official festival website remains the primary outbound CTA; affiliate ticket links are secondary and never replace it.

We may track outbound clicks to understand intent. That tracking is never used to reorder editorial results toward higher-commission links.

Sponsored placement appears only in the Featured Festivals module and other clearly marked sponsor surfaces. It never appears inside quiz results, Similar Festivals, browse-page default ordering, or map pin prominence.

Every sponsored placement carries a visible Sponsored or Featured Partner label in text — not color alone.

A festival cannot buy its way past our publishing standard. Sponsored festivals must meet the same Verified bar as every other published record.

Scores are not for sale. A sponsor's beginner score, vibe tags, and Watch Outs are written exactly as they would be otherwise — including unflattering Watch Outs. If a prospective sponsor objects to honest Watch Outs, we decline the sponsorship, not the copy.

The quiz is a hard editorial surface. Recommendation logic reads only editorial fields — genres, vibe tags, price tier, camping, size, beginner score, region — and never commercial fields like affiliate status or sponsor status.

Sponsored festivals appear in quiz results only when they earn placement through the same scoring as every other record, and they appear without sponsor styling in those results.

Media passes and comped tickets may be accepted for Field Notes coverage. Every resulting piece states plainly that access was provided by the festival.

Festivals never review, approve, or edit Field Notes content before publication. That is stated up front when accepting a pass.

A comped visit that goes badly is written honestly or not at all — never softened as payment for access. Declining to publish is acceptable; publishing a compromised review is not.

Travel, lodging, or fees paid by a festival beyond the ticket itself require disclosure in the first paragraph of the piece, not just a footer note.

If a partner requests any change to an editorial field as a condition of a deal, we decline the deal.

If an existing partner disputes editorial content, we treat it as a factual-accuracy check only: facts get corrected through our normal verification workflow; judgments do not change under commercial pressure.

Any exception to this policy requires a written, versioned amendment before the exception occurs.

We re-review this policy before each new monetization surface launches, and we version every change. The golden rule does not change: no commercial relationship may ever change what Atlas Festoria says about a festival — only where clearly labeled promotion appears.