Affiliate disclosure

The short version: some links here earn us a commission, you pay the same either way, nobody pays to be featured, and most of what a New York trip costs pays us nothing at all.

Which links are affiliate links

Every "Check availability" button, and every in-text link that opens a tour listing, points to TourRadar, GetYourGuide or Viator and carries our partner tag. The three multi-day packages are sold on TourRadar, five of the day tours and tickets on GetYourGuide, and the Greenwich Village food tour on Viator. If you book after clicking one, the platform pays us a share of the commission it already earns from the operator. Your price is identical to the price you would see going straight to that listing, because our cut comes out of the platform's margin and is never added to your ticket.

There is one more affiliate relationship: five "Check rates" buttons on the hotel packages guide link to Expedia, for readers who want to book one of the five real hotels our packages use, on their own, without buying the whole package. Those five hotels, Sheraton New York Times Square, The Hotel at Fifth Avenue, Hampton Inn Princeton, The Offshore in Montauk and Residence Inn Yonkers, are the actual properties named in our package descriptions, not a curated "best hotels" list, and an Expedia booking pays us a commission the same way a tour booking does. There are no flight links, no display advertising, no sponsored posts and no paid reviews. The videos embedded on the homepage earn us nothing, and neither does the map of Manhattan and the harbor beside them. If a fifth network is ever added, this page and the footer disclosure will name it before the first link goes live, not after.

The parts of your trip that pay us nothing

This is worth saying plainly, because it is most of what you will spend. New York's average hotel room ran $333.71 a night in 2025, and unless a room happens to sit inside one of the three packages here, we earn nothing on where you sleep. The same goes for your flights, for the $3 subway ride and the $35 weekly fare cap, for Broadway seats, which averaged about $113 in the week ending 23 August 2026 and go 20 to 50 percent cheaper at the same-day TKTS booths, for the observation decks at $39 to $48, and for museum admissions such as the 9/11 Memorial and Museum at $24 to $36 or MoMA at $30. None of that reaches us.

That has an obvious consequence for our incentives, so here it is. The only part of your trip we can earn on is the tour, and the tours here run from $25 to $2,899. We could quietly push the expensive end. Instead the guides spend most of their length on the cheap end: what the subway fare cap actually does, when the free Staten Island Ferry beats a paid cruise, why a winter Niagara day is a different product from a summer one, and which day tours duplicate something a package already includes. Those pages cost us commission on purpose.

What it does not change

• Inclusion. A tour ships here if it is genuinely bookable today by an individual with published departures, if its price and rating survive two independent checks, and if its review record supports whatever a card would claim about it. Nine products cleared all three. Nothing bought its way in and nothing was offered the chance.
• Ordering. No operator can buy a position and none has been offered one. Within each group the order follows the shape of the trip, longest and most-handled first, then the shorter and cheaper options, which is why a 4.6-rated day trip with 4,341 reviews sits below a road trip with no reviews at all in the escapes section. Sorting by commission would produce a very different page.
• What we say about them. The flagship guided package carries 12 tour-level reviews and its card prints 12. The two private routes carry no stars anywhere, because their listings show reviews of the company's other trips rather than of these itineraries. The Niagara day is described as roughly 22 hours door to door. The helicopter flight is 12 to 18 minutes in the air for $322. None of that is the flattering way to sell a booking.
• What we leave out. No hop-on hop-off bus ships on this site. Every major listing was checked, they rate between 3.1 and 4.1, and one of the largest turned out to be dead, still carrying thousands of old reviews under a title its own seller had marked as unusable. A second Niagara listing was dropped when its price would not hold still across two checks. All of them would have paid commission exactly like the nine we kept.
• Corrections. A wrong price gets fixed whether or not the fix costs us a click. The whole lineup is re-checked monthly, and readers who spot a gap can write to us through the contact page.

Ratings, review counts and prices

Every rating and review count on this site is the platform's own published number at the time we checked it, read off the live listing and confirmed a second time on an independent pass before it was printed. Nothing is averaged across platforms, rounded up or invented, and where the two checks disagreed the figure was re-read rather than smoothed over. The six day products run 5.0 across 1,652 reviews, 4.8 across 7,445, 4.6 across 20,597, 4.6 across 4,341, 4.5 across 3,478 and 4.4 across 1,260. The guided package runs 4.2 across 12 at tour level, with its operator separately rated 4.5 across 954, and the two private routes show no tour-level rating at all, which is stated on their rows rather than filled in with the company's 4.2 across 21.

Prices work the same way and come with a bigger caveat. What you see is a current per-person from-price, the cheapest option on that listing when it was read, running $25 to $2,899 across the lineup. What you actually pay moves with the date, the party size, the option you pick and the country you book from. One of the nine is a live promotion, the Washington DC day trip at $107 struck through from $114, and it is labeled as a sale rather than presented as the standing rate. A price that reads differently in two places usually means the platform is showing you a localized currency, not that the operator has raised its fee.

If you would rather not use our links

Search the operator's name on the platform directly, or find that operator's own website and book there. Collette, Worldee, Royal City Tours, Interviajes NY, Circle Line Sightseeing, Statue City Cruises, HeliNY and Nice Guy Tours all sell these tours themselves. We would genuinely rather you got out on the water or up the Hudson than not. The comparisons, the cost tables, 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.