The filters a tour has to clear, and how often we recheck them, are set out on how we choose tours.
Where our information comes from
Four kinds of source, used in this order of trust.
- Official sources for anything that can be checked: the USDA Forest Service for Mendenhall Glacier, the National Park Service for Sitka National Historical Park, the City and Borough of Juneau for its buses, NOAA for whale viewing rules, the port operator for Icy Strait Point. Where a page states a fact like this, it links to the source in the same sentence.
- The Viator listing for what a tour includes, how long it runs, where it meets and its cancellation terms. When a listing changes, our page follows the listing.
- The review record on Viator: how many reviews a tour has, its rating, and what reviewers say often enough to be a pattern rather than one bad day.
- Travelers’ own videos for what a day is really like: how long the bus to Auke Bay takes, where people waited, what they wished they’d packed.
When two sources disagree, the page gives both and says which one we’d trust. A ten-minute walk in one video and twenty in another is a reason to tell you both numbers, not to pick the nicer one.
How the site makes money
Alaska Port Tours is a Viator affiliate. When you book a tour through a link on this site, Viator pays us a commission out of what it earns on that booking.
What that means for you:
- You pay Viator, not us. The price is the same as booking the same tour on Viator directly; the commission comes out of Viator’s share, not added to yours.
- Your booking, payment, confirmation and any refund are between you, Viator and the tour operator. We never see your card details.
- We’re paid the same way whichever tour you pick. No operator pays us to be listed, to be placed higher, or to be named as a pick.
- If you leave the site and book something else on Viator in the same visit, we may earn a commission on that too. That’s how Viator’s program works.
Every link that leads to a booking is marked in the code as a sponsored link, and every page carries a one-line reminder at the foot, as the FTC’s guidance on endorsements expects. Tour cards on our pages open our own page for that tour first. The button that takes you to Viator is on that page.
We don’t run display ads, sponsored posts or paid placements.
If you’d rather not book through us, that’s fine. Every tour page names the trip clearly enough that you can find it on Viator or the operator’s own site.
How we use traveler videos and reviews
Much of what our pages say about a day on the water comes from people who filmed their own trip and posted it on YouTube. For the first Alaska pages we read 61 of these videos in transcript.
The rules we follow:
- Credit in the sentence. When a page uses something a traveler filmed or said, it names the channel and links to the video right there, not in a list at the bottom.
- Counts, not adjectives. If humpbacks show up in 7 of 7 trip videos, the page says 7 of 7. It doesn’t say “always”.
- Labels on anything paid. Videos from operators, from Viator itself and from creators sponsored by a booking site are labeled as such next to the claim. We use them for routes and formats, never as reviews.
- No copying. We don’t publish transcript text or close paraphrases of what someone said, and we never use frames from their videos as images on our pages.
- Their prices stay out. A traveler who paid a certain amount two summers ago tells you nothing about today’s price, so prices from videos never appear in our copy.
- Checked before stated. Opening hours, walking times and season dates from a video go on our checking list and are confirmed against the listing or an official source before a page states them as fact.
Review text from Viator is used the same way. We report patterns, such as a meeting point that several reviewers found hard to locate, and the overall record, and we don’t quote individual reviewers by name.
What we’ll never claim
Some lines we won’t write, on any page:
- That we took a trip. Our pages say “we compared” and “we watched”, never “we went”.
- That you’ll see a particular animal. Whale and bear sightings are likely on some trips and never certain on any. Where a listing offers a refund or a repeat trip if you see nothing, we say so and leave it there.
- That a tour is the best in Alaska, the most popular, or the only one worth doing, unless a number in our research backs it and the page shows the number.
- That only a few spots are left, or that a price ends soon. If a trip genuinely sells out in certain weeks, the page names the weeks and the reason.
- That a tour is cheaper here than anywhere else. It isn’t; the price is Viator’s.
- Anything a listing doesn’t support. If the listing doesn’t mention lunch, our page doesn’t promise lunch.
- A person, a credential, a review or a date that doesn’t exist.
If you find a page that breaks one of these, it’s a mistake we want to fix. Our corrections page explains how to report it.
How the pages are produced
Each page starts from the research for its port: the Viator listings for that kind of trip, the search terms people use to find it, the pages that already rank for it, and the traveler videos about it. That research is gathered and organized with software, including AI tools that help us sort listings, pull figures from the data and draft first versions of the copy.
People make the decisions. Which tours go on a page, the order they go in, the trip we’d pick and the one we’d skip are set by the ScalePact team, and every page is read against its sources before it goes live. Facts that came from a video caption or from general knowledge go on a checking list first.
After launch, every listing is rechecked quarterly. The date each page was last checked sits at its foot. Errors we fix are logged, dated, on the corrections page.
The site is published by ScalePact. More about who we are is on our about page, and you can reach us at hello@alaskaporttours.com. We reply within 3 business days.