Affiliate Programme Terms

Machuca Homes may invite or accept individuals and businesses as affiliates, at its discretion, and may decline an application or end a participation at any time. You need a Machuca Homes account and you must be at least 18 years old.

Affiliates are independent. Nothing here creates employment, partnership, joint venture or agency, and you may not make representations or commitments on behalf of Machuca Homes.

The programme is not exclusive, and nothing in it guarantees traffic, bookings or earnings.

Your commission is 2% of the accommodation actually collected on every payment of a booking made through your referral link.

It is calculated on the accommodation only. Not on the cleaning fee, not on taxes, and never on the security deposit, which is a hold rather than a payment.

The rate is the same for every payment and every kind of booking. A short stay is collected once and earns 2% of it; a long stay earns 2% of its first month and 2% of every month after.

A long stay pays month by month. A commission is earned on every monthly payment Machuca Homes collects, for the life of the stay, up to the 12-month maximum a continuous stay may run. If the stay ends early the payments stop, and so does the commission.

A guest you refer earns you one commission. It attaches to the first booking of theirs that Machuca Homes collects on, and that booking is the one that pays — including, on a long stay, every month of it. Their later bookings do not pay again. If that first booking produces no revenue at all, the credit returns to you and their next real booking pays.

A change to the rate is not retroactive: it applies to bookings referred after the change, and a commission already assigned to you is never recalculated.

Referrals are tracked by a cookie stored in the visitor’s browser, valid for 365 days from their first click on a valid referral link.

Attribution is first-touch: the first affiliate whose link was used is credited, even if the visitor later arrives through a different affiliate’s link. When that visitor creates an account, the affiliate is attached to the account itself, once and for good, so the attribution survives a cleared cookie or a change of device for the rest of the 365-day window.

What that cannot do: attribution before an account exists lives only in one browser, so if the cookie is cleared or expires before the visitor registers, or they reach the site without using your link, no commission can be guaranteed. Attribution is also read only while your affiliate account is active.

A commission follows the money. You earn your commission on the accommodation Machuca Homes actually keeps on a booking you referred — not of what was quoted, and not of what was given back.

A referral is assigned to you as soon as the reservation is confirmed, and it is earned when the amount is final. Final means two things at once, not either one: the accommodation has been collected, and it can no longer be refunded under the guest cancellation policy in the Terms and Conditions. Money that was never collected can never pay a commission however non-refundable it was, and money that is collected but still refundable is not final yet. A settling margin of 72 hours is added to that moment before the commission is queued for payment.

For a stay that goes ahead, that moment is 7 days before check-in on a short stay, 30 days before check-in on a long stay, and, for each later month of a long stay, the collection of that month.

What follows from that:

• a request that is declined, expires or is withdrawn earns nothing — nothing was ever collected;
• a cancellation while the booking is still fully refundable earns nothing;
• a cancellation that leaves money with Machuca Homes earns the commission on what was actually kept — half of the accommodation in a half-refundable tier, all of it in a non-refundable one. The referral did its work and the booking produced revenue; the guest’s change of mind is not the affiliate’s fault;
• being partly non-refundable earns nothing early. Until the figure is settled there is no figure to pay a commission on.

A booking that has stopped being refundable can still be refunded, and those cases are the only thing standing between a commission being earned and being kept. They are: force majeure, a documented exceptions granted after check-in, a cancellation by the host, an error by Machuca Homes, and a chargeback. Any of them reverses the commission in the same proportion as the refund.

Payment. Earned commissions are paid quarterly, on 1 January, 1 April, 1 July and 1 October, covering commissions earned before that date. Payment is made in US dollars, by the same route Machuca Homes pays its hosts — ordinarily Wise — to the payment details you give it, and it may be held until you give them.

The cost of moving the money is yours. Transfer, intermediary and receiving-bank charges, and any currency conversion, come out of what is paid rather than being added to it. A transfer to a bank account in Costa Rica ordinarily costs more than one to a Wise account, and the difference is yours either way. Any tax on what you earn is yours to declare and to pay, as is any invoice or registration your own tax rules require of you.

You may not:

• take a referred guest or host off the platform, or pass one party’s contact details to the other — including after a referral has been actioned. This is a material breach: it forfeits pending commission and it may end your participation immediately;
• refer your own bookings, or bookings for a listing you own, co-host or otherwise control. The platform blocks these before a commission exists;
• interfere with tracking — stuffing cookies, forcing clicks, or claiming a referral a visitor did not make;
• misrepresent Machuca Homes, a listing, a price or a condition of a stay, or offer a discount, rebate or cashback that Machuca Homes has not published;
• bid on Machuca Homes brand terms in paid search, or register domains, social accounts or app names that could be taken for ours;
• use the Machuca Homes name, logo or listing photographs for anything other than promoting the listings you refer;
• promote through unsolicited messaging, or in any way that breaches the law or another platform’s rules.

Machuca Homes investigates suspected breaches and decides them, and may withhold or adjust commission in cases of fraud, dispute, chargeback or breach of these terms.

You accept these terms in your Affiliate Area before you can use it. Machuca Homes records that acceptance — the date, the version accepted, and the IP address it came from — and keeps that record for as long as the programme’s accounting and legal obligations require, because it is the proof of what you agreed to.

Accepting the current version is a condition of taking part, and when this document changes materially you are asked to accept the new one. Until you do, commissions you earn are held rather than paid — they are not lost, and they are released once you accept. If you have not accepted 30 days after being asked, your participation is paused: your referral links stop attributing bookings, commissions already earned are kept, and accepting reactivates your account.

Referral tracking uses cookies, and running the programme means processing personal data about you and about the visitors you refer. What is collected, why, and what you can ask for is in the Privacy Policy.

Machuca Homes may change, suspend or end the programme at any time, including its commission rates, eligibility and payment terms. Continuing to participate after a change is acceptance of it.

Either of us may end your participation at any time. Commissions already earned under the rules above are still paid, provided there has been no breach; commissions not yet earned lapse, and a long stay’s monthly trail stops with your participation.

Everything not covered here — including how the platform works, what a booking costs and the law that governs your agreement with Machuca Homes — is in the Terms and Conditions. Where the two disagree about a commission, this document governs.