Questions about this site
Who runs it, who pays for it, where every figure on it came from, and what happens when a source turns out to be wrong. Questions about the tours themselves, routes, food, group sizes and what the ticket buys, are answered on the homepage and in the guides.
Who this is, and how it pays for itself
Who writes this site?
An independent research desk with no stake in any tour listed here. Pages carry no personal byline and no first-hand review of an individual operator: nothing on this site claims that somebody from the desk walked a particular company's route on a particular morning. The work is reading every live listing, comparing what each one actually includes, checking the barrio facts against official sources, and writing down the differences. Route, inclusion, group-size and policy facts belong to the operator's own listing and are attributed there.
Do you run any of these tours?
No. This site is not a tour operator, a guide company or a booking desk. It runs no tours, employs no guides in Medellín, sells nothing, holds no reservations and takes no payment. Every card here opens the operator's own listing, and the booking, the confirmation email, the meeting point and the cancellation window all live on that side.
Which also settles what we can do once you have booked, which is nothing. Every tour on this site refunds free up to 24 hours before the start, unusually consistent across a lineup this size and worth using: take the morning slot you want now instead of gambling on availability later. Actioning it is not ours to do. Amendments, cancellations, refunds, accessibility questions and a late-running group all go through the confirmation email you were sent, which carries your reference number and a message button that reaches the people holding your place. Writing to us first only costs you time.
How does this site make money?
Through affiliate commission. The links to tours carry a partner tag, and if you book after clicking one, the booking platform pays us a share of its own commission. The affiliate disclosure names the platforms involved and sets out the full arrangement. It is the only way the site earns: no advertising, no sponsored placements, no hotel links and no paid reviews.
No operator pays to be included or to sit higher on a page, and none has been offered the chance. Where a category leads with one tour, that tour is the most-reviewed one in its category, which anyone can check against the numbers on the cards: the cable-car page leads with a 10,683-review tour, the street-food page with a 9,044-review one. The lineup would look identical if the commission stopped tomorrow, and no page here was written from a complimentary place on a tour.
Is the price different from booking direct?
No. You land on the same listing, at the same price, in the same currency your account is set to, and the commission comes out of the platform's margin rather than being added to your ticket. Nothing on this site marks a tour up, bundles a fee or resells a seat. The one difference a click makes is invisible to you: a cookie that credits this site if you book, which is what pays for the research.
Where the numbers come from
Where do the ratings and review counts come from?
They are the booking platforms' own published figures, copied exactly off the live listing and then checked a second time from an independent channel before being printed. Nothing is averaged across platforms, rounded up or invented, and no rating here is a score this site awarded. When two checks disagree, the figure does not get printed at all: not split down the middle, not taken from whichever source looked friendlier. The 12 tours carry 27,775 traveller reviews between them, and that total is the sum of the real per-listing counts rather than an estimate.
What does a "from price" actually mean, and how often is it rechecked?
It is the floor, not a quote: the cheapest option on that tour at the moment the listing was read. Your real number moves with the date, the option you pick, how many of you are booking and the currency your account is set to, which is also why the same tour can show a different figure on two screens. Across this site the per-person from-prices run $14 to $119. They are re-pulled on a monthly cycle, and a price that stops verifying comes off the site rather than sitting there aging quietly. Every card opens the listing, and the listing is always the authority on what you will be charged.
Why does one tour appear in your research but not on the site?
Because its price would not verify. Thirteen live listings were read for this lineup and 12 carry a card. The one held back is a full-day Medellín and Comuna 13 combo rated 4.7 across 421 reviews, running about eight hours, whose from-price could not be read cleanly on any channel. A card with a blank price is an advertisement rather than a comparison, so it waits for the next price sweep. That is the same rule applied to every figure here: two channels agreeing is the bar for printing a number.
Using the site
Why do the tour links open in a new tab?
So you do not lose the comparison. Most people open three or four listings to check dates and start times against each other, and if each one replaced this page you would be hitting the back button all afternoon. The new tab keeps the category page, the price table and whatever you were weighing up still sitting where you left it. Those links carry our partner tag, which the disclosure page explains, and they go to the operator's own listing rather than to a middleman.
How do I report something that is wrong?
Email us and say what looks off. A price that has moved, a meeting point that has changed, a group cap that no longer matches, a route that has dropped the cable car during a maintenance window: all of it is worth a message, and corrections get made against the live listing, so a link to the page showing the change is the fastest possible fix. Operators are welcome to write too. Two things we will not do is remove an accurate figure because it is unflattering, and move a tour up a page. The address is on the contact page.
The free-tour question
The free tip-based tours are free. Why book a paid one?
Free tours are real, they run daily near San Javier, and this site earns nothing when you take one, which is exactly why the honest arithmetic sits on the page. "Free" means a tip at the end, and travellers report 20,000 to 30,000 pesos a person as the working rate. What you are not getting is the metro ticket, the Line J cable-car fare, the food stops and the guaranteed English-speaking guide, which is what the $14 to $28 tickets fold in. Pick by what you want carried for you, and the free-versus-paid comparison lays both columns out side by side.