Affiliate disclosure

What counts as an affiliate link here

Every cruise card, every booking button and every availability panel on this site is an affiliate link to GetYourGuide, a licensed online travel agency. They carry our partner id so a booking can be attributed here. Ordinary links between pages of this site are not affiliate links, and there are no others: no display advertising, no sponsored placements, no paid reviews, and no operator has bought a position, a phrase or a star.

Those booking links live in the page bodies only. The navigation and the footer link to nothing but other pages of this site, which is a deliberate rule and is set out on the about page alongside the other two — that no page here prints a price, and that no operating company is ever named.

The page this disclosure exists to tell you about

One of the most important pages on this site earns us nothing at all, by design, and costs us bookings every week.

Rådhusbrygge 4, where two of the six sightseeing boats leave from, is also the quay for Ruter’s line B1 to Hovedøya, Lindøya, Gressholmen, Bleikøya and Nakholmen. Line B2 runs to Langøyene in summer. Line B10 crosses to Nesoddtangen in about twenty-three minutes, and lines B21 and B22 reach Drøbak, at weekends in spring and autumn and daily in summer. Ruter’s own position is that you get to the islands on a perfectly ordinary Ruter ticket, and VisitOslo puts it the same way: with a regular public transport ticket or an Oslo Pass you can get on and off any of the ferries.

So a large part of what is being sold from that quay is already on the transit ticket in your pocket. We could have written that page to funnel every reader back towards a cruise booking. Instead it says the thing plainly, near the top, and sends the readers who wanted a boat ride rather than a commentary off to arrange it themselves on a ticket we earn nothing from. It is the cornerstone page here, and every time somebody reads it and acts on it we are paid less rather than more. Ruter is also the one company this site names, because naming the ticket is the entire point.

What the commission does not change

Not the ratings, not the ordering, and not the warnings. The clearest proof is that the lowest-rated of the six gets a full review page rather than a quiet omission, and that the highest-rated one is written up with its sample size in the first paragraph every time it appears. A 4.7 from about 2,079 reviews and a 4.5 from 158 are not comparable claims, and we refuse to print either score without its count.

The warnings cost us bookings and stay in anyway. The wooden sailing ship guarantees no seat, and that goes in the opening paragraph rather than the small print. The six-hour island trip is not wheelchair accessible, involves walking and climbing on the islands, and requires under-15s to be accompanied, and that goes above the rating. The single most-booked cruise in Oslo leaves from Langkaia, not the City Hall quays, and we say so in the same breath as its name, every time, because the alternative is a reader standing at the wrong pier.

And no page here prints a figure of money, which removes the most common way an affiliate site quietly flatters whatever pays best. What drives one boat above another is answered by what is included and what is not.

What we are not selling

We are not an operator and not a boat company. We have no connection to any of the companies whose cruises are described here, we never name them, and we cannot put you on a sailing, hold a place or refund one. If any page here ever reads as though we can, it is wrong and we want to know: contact us. More on who writes this and why: about this site.