Affiliate Disclosure — Ketchikan Alaska Tours

Plainly, and before anything else: Ketchikan Alaska Tours may earn a commission when you book through a link on this site, at no extra cost to you.

What that means in practice

The tours listed here are sold on Viator. When you follow a link from one of these pages and go on to book, the platform pays us a share of its own commission. You pay the same fare either way; the price on the booking page is the operator's price, not a marked-up one.

What we are not

We are not a tour operator or a ticket office. We do not run any of these tours, employ any of these guides or pilots, or hold your booking. Your contract is with the operator, through the platform.

We have no connection with the City of Ketchikan, the Ketchikan Visitors Bureau, the US Forest Service, the cruise lines, or any of the sights, lodges and parks these tours stop at. We sell no admission ticket of our own.

How tours get listed

Operators cannot pay for placement, position or a badge. The badges are arithmetic: the best seller is the tour with the most reviews, the top-rated tour carries the highest rating across a substantial number of reviews, and the best value is the cheapest per-person fare. Where one operator sells several trips, each can appear, because each is separately bookable.

The featured tours at the top of the homepage are three different port days, from three starting points — the town and its totem poles on foot from Berth 2, a whale boat from the Berth 2 booths, and the working crab boat from Berth 3.

Prices, ratings and how current they are

Prices, star ratings and review counts belong to the operators and were read from their own listings on 17 September 2026. They move, and the figure at checkout is the one that counts. Every fare is quoted in US dollars, per person or per group as the listing prices it, because that is how the listings were captured.

Where we state a fact about Ketchikan, it comes from the body that runs the thing described: the City of Ketchikan for the port and the Totem Heritage Center's hours, the Borough for the airport ferry, the US Forest Service for the Southeast Alaska Discovery Center and Misty Fjords, Alaska State Parks for Totem Bight, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game for licences, and NOAA's 1991-2020 normals for the rain. Population and history come from the census and Travel Alaska. Where a figure comes from an operator, such as a meeting point, a group size or time on the water, the page says so.

What we deliberately do not publish

• Admission prices for the Totem Heritage Center, Totem Bight and Saxman. We have seen them only on third-party pages, which disagree, and the official pages we read do not print them. We say which tours include them instead.
• The Ketchikan Visitors Bureau's opening hours and those of the seasonal visitor centres at the berths, which we have not read on an official page.
• Salmon run dates by species at Ketchikan Creek. Where a page gives a month, it is the tour listing's own statement about its own stops.
• Bear season dates. Bears follow the salmon, and no official page we read fixes a season.
• Trail lengths and heights for Deer Mountain, until we read them on the Forest Service's own page.
• Helicopter tours and Misty Fjords boat tours. None was on sale when the listings were read; every flightseeing trip here is by floatplane.