About This Site

A balloon ride is a strange thing to buy online. You are paying a few hundred euros for a morning that might not happen, run by a company you have never heard of, in a country where you probably do not speak the language. The same valley, on the same morning, is sold at 160 euros and at 330.

We built this because almost everything written about balloon flights is written by someone selling one. Operators describe their own flights. The big booking sites list whatever their feed hands them, in whatever order suits them. Neither will tell you that the cheapest Cappadocia flight puts twenty-eight people in one basket, or that a Luxor flight is half as long as a Turkish one, or that in Cappadocia more than a third of mornings nobody flies at all.

Those are the things we try to put in writing.

We describe flights. What you see from the basket, what the price actually covers, how long you are in the air, how many people are up there with you, and where the balloon really takes off from, which is not always the town in the title.

When a flight has a drawback we say so. Twenty-eight people in the basket, or forty minutes in the air when the flight next to it gives you seventy: that goes in the description, not the small print. A page that only tells you the good parts is an advertisement, and there are plenty of those already.

We also write the things nobody sells: how a balloon works, what the landing is like, who is allowed to fly, what the wind limits are, and why the flight you booked can be called off at five in the morning.

The order is not for sale. No operator can pay to appear higher, and nothing in the ranking is driven by what we earn. Worth saying plainly, because it is not the norm: one of the large booking sites publishes, in its own words, that its ranking uses "revenue including supplier commissions" as one of the inputs.

Unless a destination page says otherwise, flights within it are listed alphabetically by name. It is a dull rule. That is rather the point: it applies to everyone equally and it cannot quietly follow the money.

Some destinations are better served by a different order, and we may use one, such as the average review score weighted by how many reviews there are behind it, or the price. Where a destination is ordered that way, its page says so. A 4.8 built on eight thousand flights tells you more than a 5.0 built on thirteen, and any score we sort by takes that into account.

A few flights are picked out by hand because they are the ones we would book. Those sit at the top of their destination and carry an "Editor's Choice" label, so you can tell them apart from the rest of the list. It is our opinion, not a paid placement.

Where a destination has sub-pages, such as the premium Cappadocia flights or the Luxor packages that include the West Bank temples, those are grouped rather than mixed in, so you are comparing like with like.

We do not compare the whole market, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. What you see here are balloon flights, and packages built around one, sold through the three booking partners we work with: Viator, Civitatis and Tiqets. An operator who sells only from its own website, or through a partner we have no account with, will not appear on this site. That is not a judgement on them. We simply never saw the flight.

Within what we can see, we still leave things out. A flight with no usable photographs, or a price so far below the local market that we suspect it is not the product it claims to be, does not get a page until we understand it.

Prices, availability, star ratings and review counts all come from those same partners. We do not collect reviews, and we have never written one.

We earn a commission on bookings made through the tour links.

It costs you nothing extra. The price you pay is the booking partner's price, the same one you would get going there directly. We do not add a fee, we never see your card, and we are not part of the transaction.

It also does not change the order, and it does not change what we write. We are not paid more for sending you to one operator rather than another, and no partner has any say in our text. If that ever stops being true, this page will say so.

We do not operate balloons, employ pilots, or own a basket. We do not take bookings or payments, and we cannot change, cancel or refund one. Every flight here is run by an independent operator and sold through a booking partner, and if something goes wrong on the day, they are the ones who can fix it.

Prices and availability come from those partners and change constantly. Treat what you see here as an indication rather than a quote: the figure at checkout is the real one.

We will. A price goes stale. An operator stops flying and it takes us a week to notice.

If you find something wrong, tell us and we will fix it. If it was wrong in a way that mattered, we will say what changed rather than quietly editing it.