Who writes this, and why

What this site is

An independent guide to Reno, Nevada. Not the tourism board, not a casino, not a tour operator, and not affiliated with the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority. Nobody in Reno pays to be on it and nobody can pay to be moved up it.

It exists because the honest comparisons a visitor needs — which casino is actually nicer, whether Midtown is worth staying in, which week will double your room rate — are mostly published by people with a stake in the answer.

How it makes money

Affiliate commission on tour and experience bookings, and nothing else at present. If you book something through a link here, the operator pays us a share and you pay the same price you would have paid anyway.

Earning today

Viator — tours and experiences only. Those links are marked, and they route through a redirect that tags the click so we can tell what the site actually earns from.

Deliberately not earning

5 further channels are declared in the code and switched off, including hotels, restaurants, tickets and gaming. Casino monetization in particular stays off pending a decision about Nevada’s gaming-advertising rules that is the owner’s to make, not an engineer’s. That is why the casino guide carries no commercial links at all — and it is what makes the criticism on those pages worth reading.

Rules we hold ourselves to

• Nothing is ranked or recommended because of money.

  Commission never affects order, inclusion or wording. The tours page states how many products we filtered OUT and why, which is the only evidence that a quality filter is real.

• We publish facts, and we say whose words they are.

  Event listings are facts — date, time, venue, price, ticket link. Promoters' descriptions and photography are theirs and are never republished. Where an operator's own words appear, they are labelled as theirs.

• We do not invent a date.

  An annual event whose next dates are unpublished is shown with an explicit caveat and the window it historically occupies, never a guess dressed as a fact.

• We say when something has closed.

  Reno has lost a great many properties, and a lot of travel writing has not caught up. Closures get a page rather than a deletion, so 'is this still there' has an answer.

• We say what we do not know.

  Thin coverage is labelled as thin. There is no restaurant directory here because a list of forty addresses would be wrong in several places within a year.

What is here right now

events, from 5 live sources

469events, from 5 live sources

experiences we recommend, of 238 available

107experiences we recommend, of 238 available

casinos, hotels and places, written up honestly

19casinos, hotels and places, written up honestly

event sources built but not yet switched on

4event sources built but not yet switched on

The calendar rebuilds with every deploy, and every source behind it is published — including the ones we have looked at and rejected, and why.