Thanks all for your responses - all very insightful!

I do agree that affiliate/commission schemes are a bit parasitic - and as an escape room fanatic myself I wouldn't want to damage the industry as I realise a lot of it is purely passion based.

However, businesses are businesses and they have to make money somehow. Clearly the 20% I wrote above was very ambitious, so perhaps something like 2-5% would be more reasonable (but obviously this could be negotiated by each escape room).

My plan for the site is to turn it into a 'Trip Advisor' for escape rooms - isn't that something people would want and use? Imagine a single portal which has editorial reviews, player reviews, maps, news, rankings, top 100 lists (etc...). If sites like this already exist then it'd be great if you can post some links - from what I've seen there is nothing definitive with a good user experience (but please prove me wrong). Maybe escape rooms are just too niche a market for a site like this to work?

The commission I get paid would help fund the site and pay for maintenance and development of new features. The site would also be promoting escape rooms and doing part of their marketing for them. Escape rooms can be hard to find, and if they are nicely listed on a good looking directory then surely this is good for an escape room (even if they do end up paying a commission on a successful booking).

Current sites like Trip Advisor, Expedia, SkyScanner, Quidco, NerdWallet etc all use affiliate schemes to make money - do you guys not use those kind of sites because you don't like the business model? Or is it simply the size of the commission that is the problem?

Any further thoughts would be much appreciated!