For travel advisors

What this is

Waterlogged River Cruise Watch answers one narrow question for a river-cruise passenger: what is the water doing on my sailing? You pick a cruise line, an itinerary and a departure date, and the site walks that voyage day by day — which gauge governs each stretch of river, 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.

It is free. No account, nothing to install, nothing to buy. We are not a booking site and we are not affiliated with any cruise line.

The commitments of Waterlogged

• Measured readings only, credited to the authority that published them. German federal gauges through PEGELONLINE, the Austrian Danube through viadonau, the Hungarian Danube through EuRIS, and others. Every reading on the site says where it came from and when it was taken. The full list is on the source matrix.
• We publish no forecast of our own. Where an authority issues one — the German federal hydrology institute publishes a 14-day and a six-week Rhine outlook — we show it as theirs, stamped with its issue time, and we never re-score it. We have a standing rule against putting our own projection in front of a reader.
• We do not tell your client their cruise will be cancelled. Only the cruise line decides that, and we say so on the page that gets asked the question: will my river cruise be cancelled? We do not predict operator conduct, we do not rank lines, and we publish no opinion about anybody's handling of low water.
• 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 naming a likely hull. Where a date came from an agency listing rather than the cruise line's own schedule, the date is marked as reported rather than confirmed, and the key under the menu says which is which.
• A gauge reading is not the depth under a ship. It is the height of the water at one measuring station. Our own arithmetic — the level we estimate a ship needs at each gauge — is labelled as ours everywhere it appears, and it is set out in full on methodology. The limits are on limits & sources.

None of this is advice — not travel, legal, insurance, navigation or financial advice. A client making a decision on it should verify with the operator and their own documents.

Finding a client's sailing

Start on the front page and use the three menus: cruise line, then the itinerary, then the departure date. The itinerary row says the route and the length rather than the ship, because most lines run an itinerary in both directions and the two directions are different sailings with different gauges on different days. Pick the direction your client is actually going.

If you know the vessel but not which itinerary it is on, the ship index lists every hull we hold, A to Z. If you know neither, the cruise lines page shows the rivers each line's ships use, and the four river pages — Rhine, Danube, Moselle, Elbe — show today's readings without needing a sailing at all.

A date missing from the menu is a gap in what we hold, not a cancelled sailing. We publish departures for a rolling three months and we do not hold every line. If a client's date is not there, that is a fact about our catalogue and nothing else.

Sending a sailing to a client

Each sailing has its own page, and that address does not change. Open the sailing, copy the address, send it. Your client opens it with no account, nothing to install and nothing to accept, and sees the water as it reads on the day they open it, not the day you sent it.

Add /map to the end of the address for the route map, which is usually the better thing to send to someone who wants to see where the tight water is.

The share control on those pages uses the phone's own sharing panel or copies the link. There is no tracking pixel and no third-party script anywhere on this site.

Sailings we do not have yet

We hold 21 cruise lines. If a client's sailing is missing, tell us: add a sailing asks for the cruise line and the departure date, and the ship and the two ports if you have them. We read every request.

For more than a handful, send a list instead. One email to info@rivercruisewatch.com with a line per sailing — cruise line, ship, embarkation port, date — is faster than the form for both of us. A spreadsheet is welcome. We need the sailings, not your client list, and you will not be placed on a list.

Neither route sends you a confirmation. We read what arrives and write back if we have questions.

If we have something wrong

Tell us and we will fix it the same day. Advisors see the operator's own documents, which we often cannot — a day table that changed, a hull reassigned, a departure that moved. If a page about your client's sailing is wrong, write to info@rivercruisewatch.com with the page, what it shows and what it should show.

The same offer stands for the cruise lines themselves, and what we have asked them for is on for cruise lines.

Who publishes this

We sell nothing, we take no commission, no cruise line pays us and no cruise line, insurer, water authority or data portal named on this site has endorsed it. More on about us.

Waterlogged River Cruise Watch Ltd., PO Box 100, Kelowna, BC V1P 1S5, Canada, publishes Waterlogged River Cruise Watch and is the party you would be writing to.