Affiliate disclosure

The arrangement, in plain terms

Grand Cayman Excursions takes part in the GetYourGuide affiliate programme. Every tour link and booking panel here carries a partner id, and if you book after clicking one, GetYourGuide pays me a percentage of the tour price. You pay exactly what you would pay going to GetYourGuide directly. Nothing is added to your bill and no discount is withheld if you go around me.

That commission is the only money this site makes. There are no sponsored placements and no paid listings. No operator has ever paid to appear here, and no operator has seen a page before it published. I do not run, crew or take bookings for any of the seven excursions listed — who writes this site sets out what I actually do for a living and why it matters.

The part that costs me money to write

The prices on this site run from US$79 per person to US$1,200 per boat. A percentage of US$1,200 is worth more to me than a percentage of US$79. So here is the sum, stated as plainly as I can manage:

If there are two of you, book the shared boat. Two seats on the US$79 catamaran is US$158. The cheapest private charter is US$650 for the whole boat and the next two are US$765. For a couple that is US$492 more for the same three stops on the same sound, and it earns me several times as much. The private boats only start costing less per head at nine people on the US$650 charter and ten on the US$765 ones. The luxury charter at US$1,200 caps at six guests, which is US$200 each even when it is full, and it never beats the shared price at any group size.

Every one of those numbers is on shared boat or private charter as a table you can check, and the same table is repeated on the private charter review. It is repeated because it is the most valuable thing on the site and the most expensive thing for me to say.

What the commission does not do

It does not set the order of the list. The seven excursions on all tours are ordered by the decision a reader is actually making — the three shared boats first, then the private charters cheapest first — not by price and not by what pays best.

It does not flatter the ratings either. Four of these products carry a perfect 5.0, and this site prints the sample size next to every one of them: 4, 4, 4 and 1. A commission would be much easier to earn by writing “rated 5.0” and stopping there. The reviews hub prints all seven counts in one table, quotes the complaints verbatim, and says which single rating is worth leaning on.

And it does not hide the bits that are not for sale. Standing on Seven Mile Beach costs nothing, the beach is public along its whole length, and the bus that gets you there is CI$2 — except on a Sunday, when it does not run at all. That is on what you can do without booking anything, and I earn nothing from any of it.

The test I hold myself to: if a page would read differently were there no commission, the page is wrong. If you find one that fails, tell me at [email protected].