About this site

Ten sailings leave the downtown riverfront on three boats, and from the top of the levee they all look like the same white paddlewheeler with a red wheel. They are not. Which wharf, which band, whether a meal is included at all, and what the ticket actually costs: sorting that out is the whole job here.

Who writes this, and on what basis

Chris Mackelroy has worked with river cruise visitors in New Orleans since 2015 and has helped more than a thousand international travellers pick and enjoy a sailing on the Mississippi. That knowledge is the working kind. Which deck catches a breeze in August, how early the queue starts building at the Toulouse Street Wharf, when the calliope is playing and how far up Decatur Street you can hear it, which sailing a family with a six-year-old should take instead of the one they were about to book.

What he does not do is run the boats. He is not a captain, not crew, not an employee of either operator, and nothing on this site pretends otherwise. Vessel specifications, menus, timetables, fares and policies come from the operators' own published pages and from the live listings, attributed to them. Where a page needs a figure, that figure comes from a source you could open yourself in another tab.

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 10 sailings were checked

Seventeen live product pages were read one at a time, each open on screen, and nothing here was lifted from another comparison site or a press release. Seven of the seventeen turned out to be the same sailings sold a second time on the other marketplace, so the lineup you see is 10.

Ratings and review counts	The marketplaces' own published figures, copied exactly, including the ones that do a boat no favours. Each rating was read on two independent channels 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. The 10 sailings carry 15,153 traveller reviews between them, and that total is the sum of the real per-listing numbers.
Prices	Current from-prices, per person, off the live listing. They are a floor rather than a quote: fares move with the date, the option you pick and the country you book from, so every card opens the listing where the real number lives. The spread runs $25.75 for the 75-minute sightseeing run to $190.50 for the VIP evening ticket. For the NATCHEZ and CITY of NEW ORLEANS a third channel backs the first two, because the operator publishes its own price list and it matches to the cent: $43.50 and $58.00 for cruise-only fares, $25.75 for the short sightseeing sailing.
Boats, operators and wharves	Straight from the listing fields and the operators' own pages, departure address included. Two operators run all ten sailings: New Orleans Steamboat Company, trading as Gray Line New Orleans, with the Steamboat NATCHEZ and the Riverboat CITY of NEW ORLEANS, and New Orleans Paddlewheels with the Paddlewheeler CREOLE QUEEN. Three wharves, all walkable from the French Quarter: 400 Toulouse Street behind Jax Brewery, 101 St Louis Street one block down, and Spanish Plaza at 1 Poydras Street by the Riverwalk.
Schedules and boarding	The operators' own timetables. The NATCHEZ boards at 11:00am, 2:00pm and 6:00pm for sailings at 11:30am, 2:30pm and 7:00pm, and the company states plainly that it sails very close to on time. Boarding opens at least half an hour before every departure on all three boats, which is the single detail visitors most often get wrong.
Meals, music and policies	Quoted per boat, never generalised across the river, because the differences are real. The meal is an optional upgrade on most of these sailings rather than part of the headline fare: the evening steamboat cruise is $58 without the buffet and $107.50 with it. Bands are named by the operators themselves, Duke Heitger and the Steamboat Stompers by day, the Grammy-nominated Dukes of Dixieland at night, the Muddy Mississippi Band at Creole Queen brunch. Dress code, bar rules and the kitchen's own allergy wording are quoted rather than paraphrased.

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, platforms named, is on the disclosure page.

If you would rather not use these links, both operators sell directly at steamboatnatchez.com and creolequeen.com. The comparisons, the wharf notes, the longer guides and the site FAQ work exactly the same either way.