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Today I came across this answer and I noticed that the link to bookings.com had a aid affiliate link on it (surprisingly enough, it's not visible in the diff as the link is added with the reference markdown style).

I've removed it, assuming here the policy is the same of others SO sites (such as StackOverflow itself). Do you confirm it's not acceptable to add links with a proper affiliation ID?

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I'm the one who posted that answer, and I'm sorry I did not know it was an affiliate link.

If you have a booking.com account, please go to the My Bookings, and click any of the past booking. You will see it has a similar URL pattern.

Here is a screenshot how it looks when I opened: enter image description here

I'm against posting affiliate or misleading links too. Thanks for editing the post for me.

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    So it seems it's more of a tracking ID for booking.com to know where the users come from than a proper affiliation ID. That makes sense, it did seem a bit out of character for you to post an affiliate link in the middle of a good answer. – drat Jan 26 '16 at 13:05
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I saw your edit in the review queue and was asking myself the exact same question. I searched for it and found the following question on meta.stackexchange: Affiliate links (Amazon and others)

The question is quite old, and I'm not sure whether there is a different or new rule on this, but at that point the consensus seemed to be that it is not okay to use affiliate links and that those should be removed or even flagged as spam. In my opinion in this case the appropriate action would be to edit out the affiliate part or the link (as you have done) as the answer is otherwise useful and the link is relevant to the answer.

On an interesting side note, all the amazon links on the stackexchange network are automatically transformed into affiliate links with the revenues going to the company behind this website.

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    The side note in your last paragraph may not be quite correct. Certainly in the past the affiliation rewriting was narrowed to only affect amazon.com links because it was breaking links to other Amazon sites. (Full disclosure: the link in this comment contains affiliate tracking which may help me get the announcer badge on meta.cooking.stackexchange.com ;) – Peter Taylor Jan 27 '16 at 22:39
  • Are you sure it's an affiliate link? If I copy the address, it only says 'meta.cooking.stackexchange.com/a/1285/4590' I think they might filter out those for internal links. – drat Jan 28 '16 at 1:08
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    @drat, yep it's something like answer number/user number, if it was the regular URL, it should be: meta.cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/1277/… (source: I used to get the announcer badge, a lot, on travel) – Mark Mayo♦ Jan 28 '16 at 14:03

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