About toltips
Travel of locals’ tips. A site that answers one kind of question: this place or that one?
What this site is
toltips compares two destinations the way a fight card compares two fighters: the measurable facts on the tape, five rounds, a verdict. The facts are read from official pages, entry rules from the Portuguese foreign ministry, climate normals from the WMO, price levels from the World Bank, sights from the national tourism boards, and each cell on the tape says where it came from and when. Four rounds are scored by rule; one is our call, and we say so. The method is written down at how comparisons are sourced.
Where we have vetted local operators, the site is also a booking desk: the tours hub sends you to a guide's own WhatsApp, with no platform in between. Madeira is live because the people behind this site live there.
What it was
toltips started as a travel blog, 334 articles across 61 categories, published in 2025 and 2026 by a handful of contributors, among them a Caucasus tour guide and a North Africa tour guide, which is where the site's name comes from. Some of those articles found readers and still do: the Istanbul mosque comparisons, the Morocco or Algeria question, the Caucasus pair. Those pages showed us what the site was good at, and the engine is built around it. The rest of the archive is kept at its original addresses, filed by destination, and marked as archive: published as it was, not re-verified.
Who
The comparisons carry the byline toltips editorial, which is the people who run the site and read the sources, based in Madeira. There is no persona, no stock face and no invented reviewer anywhere on the site. Operators on the tours hub are people we have met.
How the site earns
Two ways, both stated: a commission from operators on tours that happen, paid by the operator and never added to your price; and labelled sponsored articles under the terms on the partner page, which never appear on the card. No affiliate links are hidden in comparisons, and no comparison is for sale.
Write to us
An address for corrections, operator enquiries and partnership questions is published here once the site's mail is set up; it is not yet. A correction with a source link gets fixed on the page with the read date updated. Tour bookings do not go through email; use the WhatsApp button on the hub.