Who Is Behind This Site
Oleg Galeev
Oleg is a Galapagos travel writer and trip consultant, and the founder of CruisesToGalapagosIslands.com. He has been to the archipelago three times. The first visit, in 2021, was land-based island hopping, which is exactly the kind of trip this site is built around. In 2023 he went back and booked a cruise at the last minute, and in 2025 he returned specifically to work through the options properly rather than as a tourist.
The rest of his time goes into a Galapagos cruise search platform, where he leads a team that has catalogued hundreds of cruise and tour options, and into his travel blog, MyTrip2Ecuador.com. That cataloguing habit is the reason this site exists: once you have read a few hundred Galapagos listings, the gap between what operators publish and what travellers actually need to know is impossible to unsee.
Trip years and roles are Oleg's own, from his published profile. The listing counts are ours, from the verification pass behind this site.
What Oleg Does, And What He Does Not Do
The honest line first. Oleg has not personally taken any of the 80 tours listed on this site. Not one. He is not a naturalist guide, he holds no diving qualification, and he does not live in Ecuador. Where this site describes a specific boat, the voice is research and reporting: the listing shows this, the itinerary lists that, reviewers mention the other.
What he does have is three visits' worth of lived logistics. Flying via Quito or Guayaquil and having his bags inspected before check-in. Paying the park fee on arrival. Crossing between islands on the lanchas. Walking out to Tortuga Bay on Santa Cruz. Working out, in 2023, what booking a cruise at the last minute really costs. Those are the parts he writes in the first person, and only those.
We are strict about this because the alternative is the thing that makes travel content worthless. A site that claims firsthand experience of 80 boats it has never boarded is telling you nothing you can rely on. Drawing the line visibly is more useful than blurring it.
How A Listing Gets Onto This Site
Every tour here was individually opened on the operator's own booking page and confirmed live before it was published. From each listing we take the rating, the review count, the duration, the displayed price, the departure port, the operator's name, the inclusions, the meeting point and the cancellation terms. Nothing is pulled from a feed and nothing is estimated.
Two rules govern what happens next. If the live page contradicts an earlier note, the live page wins. If the live page publishes nothing for a field, this site publishes nothing for it either, because we would rather print nothing than print a guess. Twenty-five of the 80 listings display no rating at all, and the site shows that plainly rather than inventing a score.
Facts that are not about a specific tour stand on primary sources. The $200 park entrance fee and the $20 transit control card come from the park authority's own fee page, the visitor split between land and cruise comes from the park directorate's 2025 annual visitor report, and the park rules come from the published rules for visitor sites. Where we could not verify something, it is left out. You can see the method at work on the comparison page.
Why The Review Counts On This Site Look Small
They look small because they are. The best-reviewed Galapagos day tour in the set carries 154 reviews. Across all 80 listings the total is 1,527, and 25 of them display no rating at all. A comparable day trip in a European capital would show several thousand.
That is a fact about the destination, not a verdict on the operators. Only 290,404 people visited the Galapagos in the whole of 2025, and most of them booked through a specialist agent or a cruise line that never touches these platforms. The dive market in particular runs almost entirely on direct bookings with shops in Puerto Ayora and Puerto Baquerizo Moreno.
So we treat star ratings here as a weak signal and itineraries as a strong one. When you read a tour page on this site, the space goes to what is actually included, how long the crossing takes and where the boat leaves from, because those details predict your day far better than the difference between 4.5 and 4.8 on eleven reviews.
How This Site Makes Money
Affiliate referrals, and nothing else. When you click through to a tour, you leave this site and land on the operator's own booking page, and the price is the same either way. There is no markup, no booking fee, and no payment ever passes through this site. The full statement of how the site is funded is on the disclosure page.
What matters more is what that arrangement does not do. Tours are ordered by review count on every page here, including the ones with no reviews at all, which sort last. Nothing an operator pays changes that order, and no operator has paid to appear or to move up. Where a listing is weak, thin or oddly priced, we say so, and the diving category is the clearest example: five listings, 14 reviews between them, and we tell you to consider booking direct instead. The full note is on the disclosure page.
We also do not sell tours, take bookings, or hold any commercial relationship with the operators beyond the platform links. If something is wrong on a page, tell us and it gets fixed.