Affiliate disclosure

The arrangement, in plain terms

This site takes part in the GetYourGuide affiliate programme. The tour links and booking widgets here carry a partner id, and if you book after clicking one, GetYourGuide pays me a percentage of what you spend. You pay the same price you would pay going to GetYourGuide directly. Nothing is added to your bill and no discount is withheld if you go around me. That commission is the only money this site makes: there are no sponsored listings, no paid placements, and no operator has ever paid to appear here or seen a page before it published.

The part that costs me money to write

The domain says tickets. There are none. You cannot buy admission to Four Corners Monument in advance from the Navajo Nation, from a reseller, or from me. It is US$8 per person, handed over at the gate when you arrive, charged per head rather than per vehicle, with children 6 and under free and no federal park pass accepted.

The proof is better than a missing button: Navajo Nation Parks & Recreation runs a working online booking system covering Monument Valley and Antelope Canyon, and has deliberately not put Four Corners in it. The operator has e-commerce and chose not to sell this park through it. So there is no commission for me anywhere near the thing you came here to visit, and anyone charging you in advance for a Four Corners Monument ticket is selling you something else.

Equally: not one of the eight tours listed on this site visits the monument. No product on the platform does. There is no location page for it there, and the only mention of the place in the entire catalogue is a customer review complaining that a tour skipped it. The tours here are the nearest bookable things to the drive you are already making — Mesa Verde about 49 road miles away, Monument Valley about 97, the Las Vegas trips about 448 — and every page that shows one says what it is and what it is not. Two Mesa Verde tours describe a viewpoint over the Four Corners region, which is a view from tens of miles off and not the marker.

So here is the recommendation that earns me nothing, stated as plainly as I can manage: if what you want is to stand on the disc with a limb in four states, drive there yourself, pay the US$8, and book nothing. It takes 30 to 60 minutes. Book a tour only if you also want a guided day at Mesa Verde or Monument Valley, and book it for what it is.

What the commission does not do

It does not set the order of the tours. They are ranked by distance from the marker, not by price and not by what pays best, because nothing goes to the monument and a price ladder would imply a comparison that does not exist. It does not suppress the bad numbers either: the lowest-rated product here is on the site with its 3.7 stars and its five reviews printed side by side, the review pages quote complaints verbatim, and the cost page adds the excluded fees back on, which makes the cheapest-looking tour stop being the cheapest.

The test I hold myself to is simple: if a page would read differently were there no commission, it is wrong. Any page that fails it, tell me at [email protected].

See also who writes this site, including the list of things I could not verify, and why no ticket exists.