Who publishes this

French river cruises are unusually hard to compare. Four French river-cruise regions, six operators we compare in depth, and itineraries described in language designed to sound comprehensive rather than to be compared. Two similarly priced cruises can differ enormously in what you actually do with the days.

So the job here is narrow and, we think, useful: read what the operators publish, record it with the date it was read, write the explanation in our own words, and be explicit about the parts we could not establish. Then get out of the way.

What we publish

• River guides. What a river is like, who it suits, who it does not, and when to go.
• Comparisons. Two operators or two routes side by side, every cell traceable to a first-party source and a date.
• Find My Cruise. A matcher that shows its reasoning, including the reasons against each entry.

What we will not publish

• A fare we have not observed ourselves, with the date we observed it.
• A rating or a review score, because we have no review methodology and inventing one would be worse than having none.
• An operator claim we could not find in the operator’s own published material.
• A negative inferred from a competitor’s positive. Where we have no source, the page says we have no source.
• Generated photography of real places.