What the small print actually says

The Excursion Edit checks tour listings drawn from mainstream tour operators against the operator’s own published terms — not the marketing page, not the booking platform’s headline, the binding small print. The catalogue currently covers 1,938 listings across 140 ports. These are the aggregate findings; every figure updates automatically as the checks continue.

“Free cancellation” survives the small print a little over half the time

Where a listing advertises free cancellation, we go and read the operator’s own booking terms. Of the 1,266 listings where we have completed that read, the operator’s binding terms confirm the promise on 578 — and qualify or contradict it on 688 (54%): shorter windows than advertised, partial refunds staged by notice period, retained booking fees, or per-activity policies that override the site-wide line. Where terms qualify the promise, our port pages show the operator’s own wording rather than a green tick.

A “return-to-ship guarantee” almost never exists in binding terms

The claim that matters most to cruise passengers is the one least often real. In a review completed in August 2026, we checked 213 operators across 29 cruise ports: 56 advertised a return-to-ship guarantee somewhere on their own website, and 0 of those advertisements were backed by a remedy in the operator’s binding terms. In 9 recorded cases the terms actively disclaimed what the marketing promised. The one genuinely binding guarantee document the review surfaced was scoped so narrowly that we could not tie it to any bookable product — so we do not show it.

Across our whole catalogue, only 15 listings in 8 ports carry a return-to-ship guarantee that survived a read of the operator’s binding terms — each shown with the operator’s own wording, and each pill opens to an “If they fail:” line stating what the terms provide when the guarantee is missed: a capped amount, or — more often — no stated remedy at all. If a tour page anywhere tells you “we guarantee you won’t miss your ship”, the only version of that promise worth anything is the one written into the terms you accept at booking.

Liability cover: stated often, evidenced rarely

We show an operator’s public-liability insurance as confirmed on 28 listings. The bar is deliberately high: a bare “we are fully insured” does not qualify — newly confirmed cover requires the operator’s own documents to name the insurer, and where published, the policy number. Far more operators state insurance than evidence it; where the evidence is not there, the port page says “not stated” rather than repeating the claim.

How to read these numbers

Every check has three honest states — stated yes, stated no, or not stated — and we never fill a gap with a guess. A listing with no cancellation verdict is one whose operator read is still ahead of us, not a hidden “no”. The method, and what we deliberately leave blank, is set out in How we check.

If you reference these figures, please link this page — the numbers above update as our checks continue, and the date at the top is when they were last generated. For the record behind any individual figure, write to connect@tourcrest.co.uk.