Independence and funding
This site does not accept paid placement, sponsored positions, or a fee for inclusion in the ranking. No operator, including the one that ranks first, has paid for its position or for any preferential treatment. Ranking position is a direct output of the formula on the methodology page, applied identically to all ten operators.
Review handling
Review samples referenced on this site are chosen to be representative, not selective. Criticism is published alongside praise for every operator without exception; where an operator's public reviews show a substantive complaint, it appears on this site. This site does not filter reviews by score — a practice sometimes called review gating, where only positive material above a threshold is shown. Review gating misleads a reader into thinking an operator has no meaningful criticism, and this site does not do it.
Aggregate rating figures are published as ranges with the source platform named. This site does not emit review or rating structured data (schema.org Review or AggregateRating) anywhere, because no first-party verified review base exists yet. Publishing that markup on top of third-party aggregated figures would misrepresent them as this site's own verified reviews.
Quotation policy
Most review text on this site is paraphrased in this site's own words, not reproduced verbatim. Where a review is quoted directly, four rules apply without exception: no quoted fragment runs longer than fifteen words; no single review is quoted more than once; every quote links directly to the source page it came from; and a review is never quoted, or paraphrased, unless the page it appears on was opened and read directly by someone on this team. A figure or claim sourced only from a search snippet or a third-party summary does not get published, quoted or otherwise. Full detail, including the specific sources this site could and could not verify, is on how we read reviews.
How operators enter and leave the ranking
An operator is included if it runs Antarctic voyages in the current season, publishes fleet capacity and ice class per ship, publishes pricing, and discloses its IAATO membership status. Inclusion criteria and the submission process are on the Submit an Operator page. Inclusion cannot be purchased, and submitting data does not influence where an operator lands in the ranking — only the formula does that.
Corrections policy
If a reader or an operator identifies an error — a wrong capacity figure, an outdated price, a misstated ice class — send it through the corrections route on the contact page. Verified corrections are applied to the live data and reflected in the next ranking recalculation. This site aims to acknowledge correction requests within a reasonable window and will state so directly rather than promise a specific turnaround it cannot guarantee.