Affiliate disclosure
Plain terms: booking links on this site can earn us a commission, the price you pay stays the same either way, and no operator pays to appear.
Where the commissions come from
Every button and in-text link that opens a cruise page carries our partner tag. The eight Danube cruises compared here are sold through GetYourGuide and Viator. When someone books after following one of those links, the platform passes along a share of the commission it already collects from the operator. The price on your ticket does not move because of it: the cut comes from the platform's existing margin, so you would pay the same amount had you tracked down the listing on your own.
One page also links to a free walking tour listed on GuruWalk, an independent platform for pay-what-you-want tours run by independent local guides. That link carries our referral code. A GuruWalk tour has no fixed ticket price at all, so there is no ticket margin to share the way there is with a cruise: the guide is paid whatever tip participants choose at the end, and our referral link is compensated by GuruWalk directly rather than by the guide or the tip.
That is the entire arrangement, and it is deliberately narrow. Two cruise-booking partners sit behind the listings, plus the one GuruWalk referral link on the free walking-tour page above. No banner ads, no sponsored articles, no operator paying for a mention. Should a further partner ever be added, this page will say so before the first new link appears, not after the fact.
What money cannot buy here
- Inclusion. A cruise gets listed by being real, bookable and accurately described, full stop. Eight cruises qualified across three categories: dinner cruises, unlimited-drinks cruises and sightseeing cruises on the Danube.
- Ranking. No operator has paid for placement, and no such offer would be accepted. When one cruise sits at the top of a category, that position comes from the listing itself, its rating and review count printed right on the card so you can weigh the same evidence.
- How we describe them. A cruise with no published star average is never presented as a crowd favourite. Whatever figures appear on a card are the figures the live listing itself publishes, nothing more.
- What stays off the site. A cruise only earns a card if its listing shows a real bookable departure. Anything hazy on price, or bookable only by emailing an operator directly rather than through a live listing, is left out.
Ratings, reviews and prices
Every star rating and review count on this site is lifted straight from the live booking page, not estimated or averaged by us. Numbers are never mixed across platforms, and a cruise with no published rating stays unrated rather than guessed at.
Prices work the same way and come with a bigger caveat. What you see on a card is a current from-price, the cheapest option on that listing when it was read. What you actually pay moves with the date, the option you pick, the group size and any add-ons, so the live listing is always the authority.
Booking without our links
Using our links is entirely optional. You can search the cruise name on a booking platform yourself, or book through the operator's own site, since each listing names the company running the boat, from Legenda Cruises to Hungaria Koncert Ltd. The comparisons, the price notes, the FAQ and the guides read the same whether a single booking link is ever clicked or not.
Questions about any of this: send us a message. How cruises are chosen in the first place is laid out on the about page.