About this site, and who writes it
My name is Selina Ebanks. I am a snorkel guide in West Bay, I work boats out on the North Sound, and I take money from visitors every working day. I write this site on my own, and it exists because of one thing I watch happen at close range more often than anything else: people misreading a dollar sign. The Cayman Islands dollar has been pegged against the US dollar since 1 April 1974, and it is the stronger of the two. A price written “$” ashore is very often Cayman dollars, reading it as US dollars leaves you 20 per cent out, and nobody at the till is going to explain that to you.
What I am not
I do not run, own, crew or take bookings for any tour listed on this site. I have no arrangement of any kind with the operators behind the seven excursions here, none of them has seen a page before it went up, and none of them can pay to appear or to be moved up the list. I guide for a living on the same stretch of water they work, which is where the knowledge comes from and also why the sentence you are reading has to exist. A site written by a competitor, reviewing its rivals, would be worth nothing. This one is written by somebody who is in the water and is not selling you a seat.
I am also not the Water Authority, the Public Transport Unit, a cruise line, a port agency or the Cayman Islands Government. Where an answer belongs to one of them, I quote them and name them rather than paraphrasing them into my own voice.
Why a site about a dollar sign
Three sums, and I have watched visitors get all three wrong.
- The currency. Misreading a CI$ price as US$ costs you 20 per cent. Paying cash in US dollars where shops take them at CI$0.80 costs about 4 per cent against the peg, which is the small one, and it is the one every guidebook writes about. The public bus fare is CI$2. That is US$2.40, not “two dollars”. It is on the dollar trap.
- The unit. Three of the seven excursions here are sold per person and four are sold per boat. US$650 next to US$79 looks like eight times the price. It is not: US$650 buys a whole boat for up to ten guests, which is US$65 each if you fill it. The crossover is on shared boat or private charter.
- The rating. One product here has 325 reviews behind its score. The others have 17, 4, 4, 4, 2 and 1, and four of them sit at a perfect 5.0 on that. A 5.0 from one review is one person. Every score on this site is printed with its sample size, and the reviews hub shows you all seven counts at once.
None of that is difficult. It is just nobody’s job to tell you, and it costs real money on a day when you are ashore for a few hours and doing arithmetic in your head on a dock.
How this site makes money
Affiliate commission from GetYourGuide, and nothing else. If you book through a link here, GetYourGuide pays me a percentage of what you spend and you pay exactly the price you would have paid going to them directly. No operator pays to be listed, there are no sponsored placements, and nothing is ordered by what pays best. The uncomfortable version of that arrangement, including the case where the honest recommendation costs me the most, is set out on the affiliate disclosure.
How I decide what goes on a page
Three rules, in this order.
- The source travels with the claim. The peg comes from the Currency Law 1974. The bus fares come from the Public Transport Unit. The tap-water figures come from the Water Authority. The stingray material comes from the encyclopaedia article on Stingray City. Where a page tells you something, it tells you who said so.
- Product facts come off the product page and nowhere else. Every price, rating, review count, duration and group cap on this site was read from the cached listing on 16 August 2026. Nothing about a tour is written from memory, from a press release or from what a boat like that usually does.
- Contradictions get printed, not tidied. Where two sources disagree, both go on the page with their names attached. The population of these islands is the standing example: the same article gives “over 90,000” and a late-2022 estimate of about 81,546. I print both and pick neither.
What this site could not verify
Everything below was looked for and not found. None of it appears as fact anywhere here. If you read it stated confidently somewhere else, ask that page where the number came from — because I asked, and there was no answer.
- How long tendering takes. George Town is a tender port and that is sourced. How many minutes it costs you at either end is not published anywhere I could reach, so this site does not give you a figure to plan against.
- Whether cruise-line excursions get tender priority. Widely asserted, nowhere confirmed. It is the single most repeated claim about this port and I could not stand it up.
- How often a Grand Cayman call is cancelled for weather. No published rate exists. A call can be cancelled in a swell; how likely that is on your date is not something I or anyone else can honestly quantify.
- Whether a berthing pier is planned, funded or approved. Every version of that story is somewhere on the internet. None of them is on this site.
- Any taxi fare. Taxis here are not metered; they work on a dispatch basis with an approved fare table. I have not seen that table, so I quote no fare in either currency, which is why the pages send you to the bus instead.
- Which side of the road traffic drives on. I know the answer from living here. I could not confirm it against a source I could name in the session that built this site, so it is not stated as fact on any page. That is how strictly the rule is applied.
- Whether a visitor’s driving permit is needed, and what car hire costs. Neither is sourced here, so neither is claimed.
- Whether ATMs dispense CI$ or US$. Not verified. Assume nothing and read the screen.
- How many stingrays are at the sandbar, and whether the number is rising or falling. No population figure is published in the source this site uses, so it gives none, and it gives no trend either.
- Whether feeding the rays is harmful. The source records “growing concerns about alterations in behaviour, feeding patterns and general ecology of these rays, when compared to rays not receiving supplemental nutrition”. That sentence is quoted on the Stingray City page and this site does not go one word beyond it in either direction.
- Any operator accreditation, certification or award. Nothing I could source, so nothing claimed, for any of the seven.
- Whether the water supply is fluoridated, and whether cistern or well water at a private property is equivalent. The Water Authority’s statement covers its own piped supply. It does not address either question, so neither does the tap water page.
- Monthly rainfall and air-temperature normals, and therefore any “best month”. I can source the wet season, the dry season, the hurricane window and two sea temperatures. A month-by-month table would be invented, so the timing page reasons from the windows instead.
- Any crime statistic or safety rating, any mosquito-control detail, any mobile roaming cost or coverage claim. Six questions people actually ask, and no figure I could stand behind. The safety page says that rather than repeating a travel blog.
- How Grand Cayman compares with Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas, Belize or Aruba. Five of the questions people search are comparisons with other islands. I have no data on those islands, so this site returns no verdict on any of them.
That list is longer than most sites’ entire fact-checking policy, and it is the part of this page I would keep if I had to delete the rest.
Corrections
If something here is wrong I would rather have the correction than be right. Email [email protected] with a source if you have one, or use the contact page. Prices, ratings and review counts move; the pages carry the date they were read. The peg does not move, and has not since 1974.
Where to start: the dollar trap for the argument this site is built on, all seven excursions for the list with the units made plain, and the reviews for every score with its sample size beside it.