Affiliate disclosure

The short version: some links here earn us a commission, you pay the same either way, nobody pays to be featured, and the view of the Golden Gate from the shore is free whether you ever book a boat or not.

Which links are affiliate links

Every "Check availability" button on a cruise card, and most in-text links that open a listing, point to GetYourGuide or Viator and carry our partner tag. The sixteen cruises compared here are split across those two platforms. A few in-text links go elsewhere: some relevant San Francisco experiences that are not bay cruises, such as the Alcatraz island-landing tour, a Golden Gate bike ride, a hop-on hop-off bus and a Muir Woods day trip, also point to GetYourGuide or Viator, and the hotel "Check rates" links point to Expedia through the Travelpayouts network. If you book after clicking any of them, the platform pays us a share of the commission it already earns from the operator or hotel. 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 or your room.

Those are the only affiliate relationships on this site: GetYourGuide and Viator for cruises and experiences, and Expedia via Travelpayouts for hotels. There is no display advertising, no sponsored posts and no paid reviews. If another network is ever added, this page and the footer disclosure will name it before the first link goes live, not after. A bay cruise passes Alcatraz, it never lands there, so wherever we link the island-landing tour we flag it plainly as a separate booking.

The parts of a San Francisco Bay day that pay us nothing

Worth saying plainly, because for some travelers they are the better answer. The walk out along the Embarcadero and Fisherman's Wharf is free, the sea lions at Pier 39 cost nothing to watch, and the Golden Gate Bridge from Crissy Field or the Marin headlands is there for anyone. The official Alcatraz landing runs on the National Park Service concessioner ferry from Pier 33, and you can always book it straight through the park for the same price; where a reseller bundles that real island ticket into a landing tour we may link it, and we say every time that it is a separate booking from a cruise, which only passes the island. The full-day Farallon Islands whale expeditions that go furthest offshore sell direct through their operators rather than on the platforms we use, so we cannot link them either. The Sausalito passenger ferry is a transit service booked through the ferry system, not a cruise we sell. All of it gets its say in the guides wherever it beats a ticket we could earn on.

The one part of your day we can earn on is the cruise itself, and the published from-prices run from about $36 for the RocketBoat thrill ride and $39 for the classic narrated loop up to $795 for a private sailing charter that takes your whole group. We could quietly push the expensive end. Instead the lineup opens with the $39 sightseeing loop, the flagship and most-reviewed boat on the board, and every card shows its own from-price so you can pick on cost as easily as on style.

What it does not change

• Inclusion. Every cruise that clears the tests is here: a real, currently bookable bay cruise or sail on GetYourGuide or Viator, run by an operator that actually sails San Francisco Bay, with published details. Sixteen listings cleared that bar, across the two big fleets, three sailing operators, City Cruises' dining yachts, San Francisco Whale Tours and the RocketBoat.
• Ordering. No operator can buy a position and none has been offered one. Where a category leads with one boat, that boat is the most-reviewed or most-booked in its section, a rule you can check yourself against the numbers on the cards.
• What we say about them. The classic Golden Gate loop carries thousands of reviews and a smaller sailing listing only a handful, and the cards print both as they are. The highest ratings on the site sit with the catamaran and yacht sails; we say so, and where a listing keeps its rating on the live page rather than publishing a settled one, its card sends you there rather than to a number we could not stand behind.
• What we leave out. An Alcatraz landing is the separate island ferry from Pier 33, not a bay-cruise product, so it is never sold here as a cruise card; where it comes up, it is an in-text link to that distinct landing tour, flagged as a different booking from any cruise. The full-day Farallon Islands expeditions, the independent schooners and the Sausalito passenger ferry are real but do not sell on the platforms we use, so they are covered in the guides and never dressed up as a bookable card.
• Things we earn nothing from. The Embarcadero promenade, the Pier 39 sea lions, the bridge from the shore, the offshore Farallones trips and the Sausalito ferry. They still get their say wherever they beat a paid ticket.

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. Nothing is averaged across platforms, rounded up or invented, and where a figure could not be read cleanly it was left off rather than guessed. Small samples are shown at their real size, so a perfect 5.0 across a couple of reviews is printed as exactly that rather than as proof of anything.

Prices work the same way and come with a bigger caveat. What you see is a current from-price, the cheapest option on that listing when it was read. What you actually pay moves with the date, the option you pick and the group size, so the live listing is always the authority. A private charter is priced per group rather than per person, and the offshore whale trips cost more than the inner-bay loops because they are far longer days on the water.

If you would rather not use our links

Search the operator's name on the booking platforms directly, or find the operator's own website and book there. Red & White Fleet and Blue & Gold Fleet run the big sightseeing and thrill cruises, Adventure Cat, The San Francisco Sailing Company and Sailing SF Bay run the sailings, City Cruises runs the dining yachts, and San Francisco Whale Tours runs the whale trips, and each one is named on its card. We would genuinely rather you got out onto the bay on whichever deck suits you. The comparisons, the cost breakdown, 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.