About Marco Ferrara, and what this site is for

What six summers on a gozzo teaches you

Mostly it teaches you what the day costs to run. Fuel, the mooring, the landing fees, the ice, the fact that a boat with twelve people aboard and a boat with four cost almost the same to take out. It teaches you that the skipper checks the forecast before he promises anybody the Blue Grotto, because the cave shuts whenever the swell is up and the entrance is the size of the rowing boat that takes you in. And it teaches you which coves are out of the swell on a north-westerly, which is why an itinerary sometimes runs backwards or skips a stop. That is a skipper reading the sea, not a tour being cut short, and I would rather explain it here than have you feel short-changed on the day.

What I am not is a guide, a historian or anybody official. What I have instead is a long memory of watching visitors make the same three mistakes: walking down to the beach with wheeled suitcases, booking the morning crossing and leaving the afternoon return to chance, and paying for a whole day at sea when what they wanted was to reach Capri and come back. Those three are why where the boats leave, booking in advance and tour or ferry exist, and they are worth more to you than anything I could tell you about the view.

The thing this site is actually about

Half the people who search for a Positano boat tour want the ferry. The scheduled hydrofoil crosses to Capri in about forty minutes for roughly €28 one-way, it leaves from the same beach as everything else, and for a great many visitors it is the whole answer. I put that on the homepage rather than in a footnote, because anyone who has already looked up the fare will assume I am hiding it, and they would be right to.

A tour is a different product from an expensive ferry. The ferry delivers you to the port and leaves you there. A tour circles the island, noses into grottoes the ferry passes at speed, anchors in coves you cannot reach on foot and carries drinks, masks and a skipper who knows which side of Capri is calm that morning. Whether that difference is worth several ferry fares depends entirely on what you want the day to be, which is the question at is a boat tour worth it and the reason every money page on this site sorts you before it quotes you anything.

How I write about the tours

Ratings, review counts and prices come straight from GetYourGuide, unrounded, which is why a live widget sits beside every number I print. Every price is a “from” figure that re-prices by date, option and party size. I never name the operator behind a listing, and I name skippers and guides only where a reviewer named them first. Where the reviewer material is thin I say so on the page instead of inventing more of it, which is why two of the six write-ups open by telling you how few people have reviewed them. The ordering and my reasons for it are at the reviews.

How this is paid for

When you book through a link here, GetYourGuide pays me a small commission and you pay exactly what you would have paid going to them directly. That is the whole arrangement and it is set out at the affiliate disclosure. The reason I can be trusted to tell you the ferry is enough is that I earn nothing when you take it, and a site that only ever said yes would be worth nothing to you and not much to me either.

Corrections

Fares move, timetables shift every year, and the seasonal boats come off the water in autumn. Confirm sailing times and fares with the operator before you travel, and tour details on the booking page. If something here has gone stale, tell me at contact and I will fix it.

Frequently asked questions