About this site
Stand on Westminster Bridge for ten minutes and half a dozen boats pass underneath, and from up there they look like the same trip at six different prices. They are not. Which pier you need, whether the fare includes a meal or only a seat, whether the boat turns round at Tower Bridge or carries on to Greenwich, whether you are buying a sightseeing cruise or a 30-knot ride to the Barrier, and what the ticket actually costs in pounds: sorting that out is the whole job here.
Who writes this, and on what basis
This site is written and maintained by James Whitfield, a London river and travel writer working independently of every operator on it. He crews no boat, sells no ticket and works for no cruise company, and no page here pretends otherwise. What he does is read the live listings one at a time, sit with the operators' own published pages, and compare the sailings on the things that decide a booking: pier, route, duration, whether food is part of the fare or an upgrade, and the current from-price in pounds.
Vessel details, menus, timetables, fares and cancellation terms come from the operators' own pages and from the live listings, and they are reported as those sources state them. Regulatory and river facts come from the bodies that publish them, the Port of London Authority above all. Where a page needs a figure, that figure comes from a source you could open yourself in another tab. You will not find first-person "I sailed it" claims here, because this is a research desk rather than a logbook: where the pages describe what a trip feels like, they say who is reporting it, usually the reviewers on the listing itself.
What this site is not: a cruise line, a charter desk or a booking service. It runs no boats, holds no reservations and cannot put you on a passenger list. Every card here opens the operator's own listing, and your ticket, your confirmation and your cancellation window live on that side, not this one.
How the listings are checked
Every cruise on this site was read one product page at a time, on screen, and nothing was lifted from another comparison site or a press release. Some sailings turn up twice, the same departure sold by the same operator on a second platform, and those twins are reconciled rather than counted again, so one boat's reputation is not split across two entries. Fifteen listings came through that process. Plenty of others did not.
| Ratings and review counts | The platforms' own published figures, copied exactly, including the ones that do a boat no favours. Each rating and review count was read on two independent passes rather than one, and where the two disagreed the live listing read is what prints while the disagreement stays on file instead of being averaged into something tidy. Nothing is rounded up to flatter a boat, and no review count is estimated to fill a column. |
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| Prices | Current from-prices, per person, in pounds, off the live listing. They are a floor rather than a quote: fares move with the date, the option you pick and the currency the platform shows for your region, so every card opens the listing where the real number lives. On several of these boats the meal is the price, not the boat, which is why a £14 circular and an £87 dinner sailing can run the same stretch of river. |
| Boats, operators and piers | Straight from the listing fields and the operators' own pages, departure point included. The sailings compared here run under City Cruises, Thames River Sightseeing, Thames Rockets, Thames RIB Experience and the London Eye's own river cruise, and the pier facts also draw on Uber Boat by Thames Clippers, which publishes the fullest information on the central piers. A product that is not currently sailing gets no card here, however well it ranks in search. |
| Routes and what you actually see | Quoted per sailing, because the routes genuinely differ. The Westminster to Greenwich run passes St Paul's, the Tower and Tower Bridge on the way downstream. The circular cruises turn round in the Pool of London and come back. The fast boats carry on east, to Canary Wharf on the short runs and all the way to the Thames Barrier on the long one. A 40-minute circular, a three-hour dinner sailing and a 20-minute RIB blast are three different days out, and the pages keep them apart. |
| Timetables, boarding and policies | The operators' own timetables and terms, attributed to the operator that published them. City Cruises asks passengers to arrive at least 15 minutes before departure, and longer if you are buying at the ticket office; Uber Boat by Thames Clippers recommends 10 minutes at the pier. Cancellation windows, child age bands and weather terms are quoted rather than paraphrased, because they differ between operators and between the platform and a direct booking. |
Three things this site will not do
How the site makes money
Booking happens on the operator's own listing, never here. The price you see there is identical to the price you would see arriving at that listing directly. No operator has paid to appear on this site or to sit higher on a page, and where a category leads with one sailing it is the most-reviewed sailing in that category rather than the one that earns most. How the site is funded, and which platforms it links to, is set out on the disclosure page.
If you would rather not use these links, the operators sell directly on their own sites, among them cityexperiences.com for City Cruises, thamesrockets.com and thamesclippers.com for the river bus and the day pass. Worth knowing before you choose: a direct booking usually carries the operator's own cancellation terms, which are tighter than the platform norm. The comparisons, the pier notes and the site FAQ work exactly the same either way.