How We Choose Tours

The filters

A tour has to clear all of these to appear in a page’s main grid.

The order starts from review count, because a trip with 9,000 reviews has a track record a trip with 40 does not. Then we adjust it. A tour that is really a glacier visit with a short boat ride goes on the glacier page, even if its title leads with whales.

Tours with no reviews or a single review don’t go in the grid. Where one of them covers something no other listing does (a private boat in Sitka Sound, say), it appears as a plain link under the grid, and the page says it has no track record yet.

Private charters priced far above the group trips sit on their own line below the grid. They’re a different purchase, usually for a family or a group of six, and mixing them into a list of group boats makes the comparison useless.

What moves a tour down or off a page

A listing drops down the grid, or out of it, when any of these happens:

• Its rating falls below 3.9 at a recheck. It comes off the page.
• Its rating slips under 4.2. It moves toward the bottom and gets its explaining sentence, or it comes off if there’s a better trip doing the same thing.
• Viator withdraws it or stops taking bookings. It comes off, and links to its tour page are removed.
• The listing changes what it includes. If a trip stops including the Mendenhall Glacier stop or the bus from the cruise dock, our page is corrected to match the listing, and the change goes in the corrections log when a page had said otherwise.
• It turns out to be on the wrong page. A Sitka sightseeing bus that only passes the harbor doesn’t belong on a whale watching page.
• Travelers report a repeated problem the listing doesn’t mention, such as a pickup point that’s hard to find. The tour usually stays, and the page says what the problem is.

No operator can pay to move up a grid or onto a page. We don’t take placement fees, and we don’t accept free trips in exchange for coverage.

How often we recheck

Every listing on the site is rechecked once a quarter.

A recheck covers the rating, the review count, whether the tour still takes bookings, and whether what our page says about it (what’s included, where it meets, how long it runs) still matches the listing. Alaska’s cruise season runs roughly May to September, so the recheck before May matters most: it catches the listings that changed over the winter.

Prices and availability are different. They aren’t written into our pages at all. The tour cards pull them live from Viator, so the price you see on a card is the price on the day you look. Each page shows the date it was last checked, in the line at the foot of the page.

What this site can’t do

Nobody on our team has taken these trips. We compare listings, read reviews and watch travelers’ own videos of the tours, and where a page uses something a traveler filmed or said, it names them and links to the video in the same sentence. We say “we compared” and “we watched” because that’s what we did. You won’t find “we went” anywhere on the site.

A few more limits:

• We can’t change, cancel or refund a booking. Viator takes the payment and the operator runs the trip; our booking help page explains who to contact about what.
• We can’t promise wildlife. Whale and bear tours depend on the animals, and some operators offer a refund or a second trip if you see none. Where a listing says so, the page says so.
• We can’t vouch for the weather or the sea. Boats and flights in Southeast Alaska are cancelled for fog, wind and swell, and the operator makes that call on the day.
• We don’t know your ship’s schedule. Every page assumes you’ll check your all-aboard time against the tour’s return time before you book.
• We only cover what Viator sells. Some well-known trips in these ports are sold only by the operator or the attraction itself, and those appear in our guides, not in the tour grids.

The research behind the Alaska pages

The Juneau, Sitka and Icy Strait Point pages were built from four sources, gathered in November 2026.

The drinks rule removed 4 tours at this stage: two Juneau brewery trips, a Juneau food and drink tasting, and a Skagway bike and beer tour.

Where the evidence is thin

We’d rather say so than paper over it.

• Juneau private tours: one traveler video.
• Icy Strait Point whale watching: one video about the tour itself.
• Sitka private tours: no traveler video found.
• Sitka walking and hiking: no video of a guided tour, only people walking on their own.

Pages built on these show it. They lean on the listings and the review record and say less about what a day is like.

One more caution. Prices, opening hours and season dates that travelers mention in videos are what was true on their trip. We check them against the listing or an official source before a page states them, and prices never appear in our copy at all.

FAQ

Do operators pay to be listed? No. A tour gets onto a page by clearing the filters above, and its place in the grid comes from its review record and what it offers. We earn a commission from Viator when someone books, and no operator pays us anything directly. The full arrangement is on our editorial policy.

Why isn’t my favorite tour on the page? Usually one of three reasons. It has fewer than 10 reviews, Viator doesn’t sell it, or it’s on a different page because of what the trip mostly is. If you think we’ve missed a trip that clears the filters, tell us and we’ll look at it at the next recheck.

How do you decide which tour you’d skip? Our tour pages name one trip we’d pass on, alongside the ones we’d pick. It’s a judgment from the listing, the reviews and the traveler videos: a shorter time on the water for the same outlay, a combo that leaves an hour at the glacier, a pickup that travelers keep getting lost finding. It’s never a comment on the people who run it.