Affiliate disclosure
The short version: some links here earn us a commission, you pay the same either way, and nobody pays to be featured.
Which links are affiliate links
Every "Check availability" button, and every in-text link that opens a cruise's listing, points to GetYourGuide or Viator and carries our partner tag. Book after clicking one and the platform pays us a share of the commission it already earns from the operator. Your price does not change, because our cut comes out of the platform's margin rather than being added to your ticket, and the fare you see is the fare you would see arriving at that listing directly.
GetYourGuide and Viator are the platforms where these London sailings are sold to individual travellers. One further relationship covers a different product: the "Check rates" buttons beside the hotels named in a few guides are affiliate links to Expedia, routed through the Travelpayouts network, and a completed stay booked through one pays us a commission the same way, at no extra cost to you. There is no display advertising, no sponsored posts and no paid reviews, and the pier map embedded on the homepage earns us nothing at all. If another network is ever added, this page and the footer disclosure will name it before the first link goes live, not after.
What it does not change
- Inclusion. Every cruise that clears the tests is here: a real boat sailing the tidal Thames through central London, genuinely bookable right now by an individual, with published departures, a live product page and a rating on enough reviews to mean something. A product that is not currently sailing is left off rather than shown as bookable, however much traffic its name still pulls. Where the same departure is sold by the same operator on both platforms, it is treated as one option rather than two, because counting a boat twice would pad the lineup while splitting its reviews across two cards.
- Ordering. No operator can buy a position and none has been offered one. Where a category leads with one sailing, that sailing is the most-reviewed in its category, a rule you can check yourself against the numbers printed on the cards.
- What we say about them. An open RIB at 30 knots is written up as brilliant in July and cold in February, not just photographed at sunset. Dinner on the water is described as a good night out rather than the best meal in London where that is the honest read. A thin review count is called thin instead of borrowed against a busier boat's reputation, and where a £14 circular does most of what a £35 evening cruise does, the page says so even though the cheaper ticket pays us less.
- What we leave out. Multi-day river voyages, and the boat trips well upriver at Windsor, Oxford, Henley and Hampton Court, are not central-London sailings, so they get one comparison page explaining the difference rather than cards, whatever they might pay. A listing that is really the same departure under another product page does not get a second card either.
- Things we earn nothing from. The Thames Path along both banks, watching Tower Bridge lift from the walkway below it, the view downstream from Waterloo Bridge at dusk, a river bus ticket bought straight from Uber Boat by Thames Clippers, and booking direct with any operator all pay us zero, and they still get their say wherever they beat a paid ticket.
Ratings, review counts and prices
Every rating and review count here is the platform's own published number, read off the live listing and then checked a second time on an independent pass before it was printed. Nothing is averaged across platforms, rounded up or invented, and where the two reads disagreed the live listing figure is what prints while the disagreement stays on file.
Prices work the same way and come with a bigger caveat. What you see is a current from-price, the cheapest per-person option on that sailing when it was read, quoted in pounds. On the Thames the meal decides the number far more than the boat does, so a sightseeing seat and the same operator's dinner sailing are separate tickets and the pages keep them apart. Fares also move with the date, the option you choose and the currency the platform shows for your region, because these listings display in pounds for a UK visitor and in dollars or euros elsewhere. The live listing is always the authority on what you will be charged.
If you would rather not use our links
Search the operator's name on GetYourGuide or Viator directly, or book on the operator's own site. City Cruises sells its sightseeing, lunch, tea and dinner sailings at cityexperiences.com, Thames Rockets sells its speedboat rides at thamesrockets.com, and Uber Boat by Thames Clippers sells the river bus and the day pass at thamesclippers.com. One thing to weigh before you do: a direct booking carries that operator's own cancellation terms, which on both of those operators are tighter than the platform default. We would genuinely rather you got out on the river. The homepage, the FAQ and the about page work exactly as well as research whether or not you ever click a booking link.
Questions about any of this: email us. How the listings are checked in the first place is on the about page.