Galápagos guide
How we score visitor sites
12 naturalist guides scored the Galápagos visitor sites from 1 to 100 across five criteria. Here is what the numbers mean, and what they cannot tell you.
Galápagos visitor sites on Book Cruise Now carry a score from 1 to 100. 12 naturalist guides, with 231 combined years of working these islands, scored them across five criteria. The scores let you compare what a route actually visits, rather than comparing brochure adjectives.
They are considered judgments, not measurements. This page explains how they were made, what the numbers mean, and where they stop being useful.
Who scored the sites
12 naturalist guides scored them, drawing on 231 combined years of guiding in the Galápagos. These are the people who run the landings, lead the snorkels, and answer the questions — the same role described in our guide to the people behind your cruise.
We chose working guides over travel writers on purpose. A guide who has landed at the same site several hundred times across two decades knows how it performs in January and in August, in a good year and a bad one. That is the judgment the scores encode.
The five criteria
Each site was scored from 1 to 100 on five separate criteria. A site is rarely strong at all five, and it does not need to be.
| Criterion | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Iconic species | Your chances of seeing the animals people come to the Galápagos for — waved albatross, marine iguanas, blue-footed boobies, giant tortoises. |
| Biodiversity | The range of life at the site overall, rather than the headline species. A site can be quietly rich without being famous. |
| Striking vistas | The landscape itself: volcanic craters, lava fields, cliffs, and the views that make the walk worth it on their own. |
| Beach quality | The quality of the landing beach for walking, swimming, or simply sitting with the sea lions. |
| Snorkel quality | What the water offers: visibility, reef life, and the odds of swimming with turtles, rays, sharks, or sea lions. |
How the overall score works
A site’s overall score is the average of only the criteria that apply to it. Many Galápagos sites have no beach and no snorkeling — a clifftop seabird colony, for instance. Those criteria are marked as not applicable and left out of the average entirely.
This matters because the alternative would be dishonest. If a site with no beach were scored zero for beach quality, that zero would drag down an average that has nothing to do with the site’s real appeal. A dry landing at a seabird colony is not a bad beach. It is not a beach.
So when you see an overall score, read it as: how good is this site at the things this site is actually for.
What a Signature site is
A Signature site scores 78 or above — roughly the top 15 percent of visitor sites in the archipelago. When you see the Signature mark on a site or on an itinerary, that is what it means, and nothing more.
On an itinerary, we show how many Signature sites the route visits. We do not average a route down to a single verdict on the cards, because averaging hides the thing you care about. A twelve-stop route that includes three of the archipelago’s standout sites is not well described by its mean.
Sites below 78 get no mark. That is not a judgment against them — see the next section.
A fair site can still be the best at one thing
A site with a middling overall score can be the single best place in the islands for one specific thing. This is the most useful thing to understand about the scores, and the easiest to miss.
Consider a site with modest vistas, no beach, and average biodiversity that happens to offer the best snorkeling in the archipelago. Its overall score lands in the middle. If snorkeling is why you are coming, that middling site may be the most important stop on your trip.
This is why every itinerary shows its scores broken out by criterion rather than as one number, and why we call out what a route is best for. Read the criterion that matches your reason for going, not the average.
What the scores cannot tell you
The scores describe a site’s potential, not your day. Wildlife moves, weather turns, and the albatross that nest at a site from April to December are simply not there in February. A high score for iconic species is a statement about the odds, not a promise.
Chance plays a real part. Two guests can visit the same site a day apart and come away with completely different trips. That is the nature of wild places, and no score can flatten it.
Personal taste is not in the numbers either. Some people would trade every seabird colony in the islands for one more hour in the water. The scores cannot know that about you. Treat them as a general indication and a way to compare routes, not as a verdict.
Cultural, historical, and scientific significance sits outside the five criteria as well. The Charles Darwin Research Station and the post office barrel at Post Office Bay do not score highly on wildlife or vistas, and both are worth your time for reasons the criteria were never built to capture. A small landmark icon marks these historic sites as you browse, so they are easy to spot even though the scores never measured what makes them matter.
Where the scores come from
The scores come from Galápagos Advisor, an expert-panel scoring project our founder built and owns. We publish them here because they are genuinely useful for comparing routes, and because we are able to stand behind how they were made.
We do not use scores scraped from other booking sites, and we do not score the ships or the operators this way. Operator reviews are a separate thing entirely, written by travelers who booked through us.