Affiliate disclosure
Ecuador Galapagos Tours is an independent guide. We are not a tour operator, not a boat owner, not a travel agency holding your money, and not a booking platform. Some links on this site are affiliate links to exactly two companies: GetYourGuide and Viator, the platforms where the operators featured here sell their tours. If you book after clicking one, we may earn a commission from the platform.
What it costs you
Nothing. The commission is paid by the platform out of its own margin, and the price you see on the listing is the price you would see arriving there any other way. There is no markup, no service fee, and no payment of any kind passes through this site. Your card details go to GetYourGuide or Viator, never to us, and the booking contract is between you and the operator.
There are no hotel links on this site and no accommodation programme behind it. If that changes, this page changes with it before any link goes live.
What the commission does not buy
Position. Every tour list on this site is ordered by review count, on every page, without exception, including on the comparison page and on each island hub. Listings that display no reviews sort last rather than being quietly hidden or quietly promoted. Commission rate plays no part in that order, no operator has paid to appear, and no operator has any editorial input into what we write about their tour.
You can check that claim against the pages themselves. The flagship recommendation, the Pinzón Island day tour, sits at the top because it holds the highest review count in the entire set, 154 on Viator, not because of anything else. The Kicker Rock full-day on GetYourGuide and the Cabo Rosa tunnels trip on Viator sit where their own numbers put them, on different platforms, with no thumb on the scale.
What we show even when it does not sell
Five of the 29 listings on this site display no rating at all. Fourteen display no headline price until you enter dates. We publish both facts as they stand: an empty rating cell says "none shown" and an empty price cell says "in the booking flow". Printing an invented figure would convert better and would be dishonest, so we do not.
The same applies to whole categories. The diving section carries six listings with 13 reviews between them, and we say plainly on that page that most Galapagos diving is booked directly with dive shops rather than through these platforms. That advice costs us commission. It is still the right advice.
Where the figures come from
Every rating, review count, duration, inclusion, departure port, meeting point and cancellation term on this site is the operator's own published listing data, read from the live GetYourGuide or Viator page rather than pulled from a feed. Prices move with date, season and currency, so the live listing is always the authority, which is why every tour button sends you there. Where a listing publishes nothing for a field, this site publishes nothing for it. More on the method is on the about page.
Why this page exists
United States Federal Trade Commission guidance requires clear disclosure of affiliate relationships, and a note buried in a footer is not clear disclosure. So it is here in full, linked from every page of the site, and repeated in plain language beside the tour recommendations themselves. If anything on this page is unclear, ask us through the contact page, or read the FAQ for how booking works in practice.