Affiliate disclosure
The short version: some links here earn us a commission, you pay the same either way, and nobody pays to be featured.
Which links are affiliate links
Every "Check availability" button, and every in-text link that opens a sailing's listing, points to GetYourGuide or Viator and carries our partner tag. Book after clicking one and the platform pays us a share of the commission it already earns from the operator. Your price does not change, because our cut comes out of the platform's margin rather than being added to your ticket, and the fare you see is the fare you would see arriving at that listing directly.
Three affiliate relationships exist on this site. GetYourGuide and Viator are the marketplaces where the cruises and the handful of secondary experiences (swamp tours, walking tours, museum tickets) are sold. Hotel suggestions link to Expedia through the Travelpayouts affiliate network, and the "Check rates" buttons are those links. No display advertising, no sponsored posts, no paid reviews, and the cruise videos embedded on the homepage earn us nothing at all. If another network is ever added, this page and the footer disclosure will name it before the first link goes live, not after.
What it does not change
- Inclusion. Every sailing that clears the tests is here: a real boat leaving the downtown New Orleans riverfront on the Mississippi, genuinely bookable right now by an individual, with published departures, a live product page and a rating on enough reviews to mean something. Seventeen listings were read and 10 are shown. The seven held back are the same departures sold a second time on the other marketplace, and counting a boat twice would pad the lineup while splitting its reviews across two cards.
- Ordering. No operator can buy a position and none has been offered one. Where a category page leads with one sailing, that sailing is the most-reviewed in its category, a rule you can check yourself against the numbers printed on the cards.
- What we say about them. The cheapest ticket on the site, the $25.75 sightseeing run on the Riverboat CITY of NEW ORLEANS, carries 53 reviews, and its card says so rather than borrowing the reputation of its 5,000-review sister ship. The buffets get described as fuel for the evening rather than the reason to sail. The $190.50 VIP evening ticket holds the highest rating here, 4.8 from 893 reviews, and the pages still say out loud that most people do not need it.
- What we leave out. Swamp and bayou tours, airboats and multi-day river line voyages are off-scope entirely, whatever they pay, because this site covers boats that sail the Mississippi from the French Quarter riverfront and nothing else. A listing that is really the same departure under another product page does not get a second card either.
- Things we earn nothing from. The calliope you can hear from Decatur Street before boarding, the free walk along the riverfront behind Jax Brewery, an hour in the French Market instead of a combo ticket, and booking straight with the operator all pay us zero, and they still get their say wherever they beat a paid ticket.
Ratings, review counts and prices
Every rating and review count here is the marketplace's own published number, read off the live listing and then checked a second time on an independent channel before it was printed. Nothing is averaged across platforms, rounded up or invented, and where the two channels disagreed the live listing read is what prints while the disagreement stays on file. The 10 sailings carry 15,153 traveller reviews between them, and that total is the sum of the real per-listing counts.
Prices work the same way and come with a bigger caveat. What you see is a current from-price, the cheapest per-person option on that sailing when it was read, running $25.75 to $190.50 across the lineup. On most of these boats the meal is an upgrade rather than part of that headline number: the evening steamboat cruise is $58 sightseeing-only and $107.50 with the Creole buffet, and brunch and lunch sailings split the same way. Fares also move with the date, the option you choose and the country you book from, so the live listing is always the authority on what you will be charged. For the NATCHEZ and the CITY of NEW ORLEANS there is a third check available to anyone: the operator publishes its own price list, and it matches the listings to the cent.
If you would rather not use our links
Search the operator's name on GetYourGuide or Viator directly, or book on the operator's own site. New Orleans Steamboat Company, trading as Gray Line New Orleans, sells the NATCHEZ and CITY of NEW ORLEANS sailings at steamboatnatchez.com, and New Orleans Paddlewheels sells the Creole Queen at creolequeen.com. We would genuinely rather you got out on the river. The category pages, the FAQ and the guides work exactly as well as research whether or not you ever click a booking link.
Questions about any of this: email us. How the listings are checked in the first place is on the about page.