Methodology: how we collect prices

What we collect

For each trip we keep a hand-curated list of licensed operators and the page on their own website where they publish prices. Our crawler (it identifies itself as BucketTreksBot) visits those pages daily, respects robots.txt, makes at most one request per second per website, and keeps a copy of the page so every price can be traced to exactly what we saw. We currently track 68 operators across 10 trips.

How a price gets onto the site

• Prices, durations and inclusions are read from the saved page by our operator agent. Every figure is stored with the exact text it was read from; a figure whose text is not on the page is rejected automatically.
• A new operator product, a price that moved more than 25% since the last check, or any extraction the agent was not confident about goes to a human review queue before it can appear.
• Prices are stored as a time series and never overwritten, which is where the trend sparklines come from.
• Prices in other currencies are converted to US dollars daily using published exchange rates; the original figure is always shown too.

Comparing like with like

Each offer is tagged with a variant (route, park, itinerary type or boat class), a number of days and whether it is a group, private or self-guided trip. The default sort is price per day because it is the fairest single number across different durations. You can change the sort; we never do it for you based on who pays us.

Verification dates and stale prices

Every row shows the date we last saw the price and a link to the source page. Anything older than 14 days is marked ⚠. If an operator's page stops showing a product, the product is removed from the comparison after review.

Licences and reviews

Where a registry exists (for example TALA in Tanzania, IAATO for Antarctica, the Peruvian Ministry of Culture for the Inca Trail) we show the registration the operator publishes. "Licence unverified" means we did not find a number on the operator's own site, not that the operator is unlicensed. Review scores are aggregated from public platforms and linked, never written by us.

What we do not do

• We do not copy operator descriptions. Text on this site is written from structured facts.
• We do not use operator photographs without a licence.
• We do not accept payment for ranking, badges or placement. How we make money.

Corrections

Operators can correct or remove their listing under our correction and takedown policy, with a response within 7 days.