For cruise lines

Who we are

Waterlogged River Cruise Watch is a free, independent site that answers one narrow question for a river-cruise passenger: what is the water doing on my sailing? A traveller picks their cruise line, their itinerary and their departure date, and the site walks their voyage day by day — which gauge governs each stretch, what it reads today, how that compares with the same date in past years, and what the waterway authority's own forecast says where one exists.

We are not a booking site, we sell nothing, and we are not affiliated with any operator. We are not a critic either. We do not rank lines, we publish no opinion about anybody's handling of low water, and we do not tell a reader their cruise will be cancelled.

The commitments of Waterlogged

• Measured readings only, from the official source, credited. German federal gauges through PEGELONLINE, the Austrian Danube through viadonau and DoRIS, the Hungarian Danube through EuRIS, and others. Each reading is shown with its source and its observation time. The whole list is on the source matrix.
• We publish no forecast of our own. Where an authority issues one — the German federal hydrology institute's 14-day and six-week Rhine outlooks — we show it as theirs, stamped with its issue time, under this sentence: Forecast water levels are from BfG. Waterlogged only reports historical and current data. We have a written standing rule against putting our own projections in front of a reader.
• We say what we do not know. Where an operator has not published which vessel sails a departure, the page says exactly that rather than guessing. Where a gauge has no published reference level, the page says there is nothing to compare the reading against. Where a date came from an agency listing rather than your own schedule, it is marked reported rather than confirmed, and the reader is told what that marker means.
• We do not republish anybody's archive, and we do not resell data. Where we have needed permission we have asked for it in writing and waited for the answer.
• We do not predict what you will decide. A reader who asks whether their cruise will be cancelled is told, on our own page about that question, that only the cruise line decides and that we cannot tell them. We publish no cancellation probability, no operator scorecard and no league table.

What we are asking for

Nothing confidential, and nothing you do not already tell somebody. Any part of this helps:

1. Departure dates for the current and next season, in any machine-readable form — even a spreadsheet by email once a season.
2. Which vessel is assigned to which departure. This is the single most valuable item. The draught of the hull is what the whole page turns on, so a departure with no vessel against it is a page that has to hedge.
3. The day-by-day port list for each itinerary in each direction, including which calls are technical stops or coach transfers rather than berths. Direction matters more than it might seem: the ports govern which gauge applies on which day.
4. Loaded draught for each vessel, or confirmation that a class figure applies. Where you tell us nothing we apply a class estimate and label it as our own; your figure would replace it.
5. A named contact for corrections, so that when we have something wrong you can tell us and we will fix it the same day.

If it is easier to start small, start with one season of dates for one river. Write to info@rivercruisewatch.com, or ask for a call and we will arrange one — and we are equally glad to show you the site first, so you can judge whether it is the sort of thing you want to be associated with.

If we have something wrong

Tell us and we will fix it the same day, whether or not you send us anything else. If a page about your sailings is wrong — a day table that does not match yours, a hull named against the wrong departure, a date that moved — write to info@rivercruisewatch.com with the page and what it should say.

We have already corrected pages this way. Where our day list disagreed with an operator's own published table, we changed ours to match theirs. Where we could not be sure which of two sister ships sailed a date, we left the vessel blank rather than print a name we were not sure of.

What you get from it

Your guests are already reading pages about your sailings, here and elsewhere. Where you tell us nothing, our page prints the operator has not published which ship sails this departure rather than an invented answer. Every gap you fill is a page that describes your product accurately to a customer who has already paid for it, at no cost and with no editorial strings attached.

One line under our sailing picker — Do not see your sailing? Email us the cruise line, the ship and the dates, and we will add it — brought thirty-eight messages in about fourteen hours, naming operators, vessels and dates unprompted.

Independence

No cruise line pays us, no cruise line has editorial input, and sending us data buys nothing but accuracy. There is no paid placement on this site, no advertising and no commission. A line that sends us a full season of dates and a line that sends us nothing are described by the same rules, in the same words, on the same kind of page.

Waterlogged River Cruise Watch Ltd., PO Box 100, Kelowna, BC V1P 1S5, Canada, publishes Waterlogged River Cruise Watch. More on about us, the limits of what these numbers can be used for on limits & sources, and the arithmetic on methodology.

If you advise travellers rather than operate ships, there is a page for that: for travel advisors. If you are a passenger whose sailing is not listed, tell us about it.