How the Index is put together

The Index publishes one thing: what a named operator publicly advertised, on a stated day. It is free, it sells nothing, and it is meant to be quoted. This page states exactly what that is — and, more usefully, what it is not.

Current collection: 26 August 2026 · 5 sources · 4 tours · 4 routes · 5 fees

1. What a figure on this site means

Every price here is a published advertised price — the number an operator put on its own public rate card, read on a stated date. It is not a price we were quoted privately, not a price we negotiated, and not an average of anything. Each figure renders a citation chip naming the source and the collection date, and that chip links to the page the number was read from.

Prices are shown as a spread between operators, low to high. We do not publish an average, because an average is a number nobody actually charges. Where operators disagree, the disagreement is the finding.

2. What is eligible as a source

Sources are tiered, and only four tiers are eligible:

• Official — the municipality, the tourism office, a regulator, or an ordinance text.
• Operator — the business that actually runs the boat, van or vessel, quoting its own rate card.
• Reseller — a ticket agent selling someone else's service. Usable, but marked, because resellers add margin and go stale without the operator noticing.
• Field — direct verification in El Nido: a price read off a board, a fee paid at a counter.

Travel blogs and AI-generated round-up articles are not an eligible source at any tier. That is enforced in code, not by good intentions: the build script rejects any source whose tier is not one of the four above, and rejects any price that carries no source at all. The site cannot be published with an unsourced number in it.

3. What this Index is not

Four things keep a price out of this Index:

• The operator publishes no rates. Most small bancero operations sell at the beach or through a hotel desk and have no website. They are a large share of the market and are entirely absent here.
• The price is dynamic. Airfares and hotel nightly rates change several times a day. A dated index of a number that moves hourly would be worse than no index, so those are excluded by design rather than scraped and quietly aged. This is why the accommodation pages carry no rates.
• The source is walled. The large tour marketplaces serve a CAPTCHA rather than a page, so their listing prices are not indexed. We are not going to work around that to obtain them.
• Nobody published a number. Several routes and fees genuinely have no public figure. Those render as no price published and are listed as known unknowns rather than filled with a guess.

So a low figure in this Index means the cheapest published rate we could trace, not the cheapest price obtainable in El Nido. Walking the beach at 6pm will almost certainly beat it. For anyone budgeting a trip, the published spread is the useful number. For anyone writing about what tours "cost" in El Nido, it is the wrong one, and we would rather say so here than be quoted incorrectly.

4. The gaps we know about right now

• The ETDF ordinance has not been read. Two independent operators both publish ₱400 and both refer to a 2024 municipal ordinance, and secondary write-ups disagree about whether it is Ordinance No. 01 or No. 20, Series of 2024. The municipality's own site sits behind a Cloudflare rule that refused every request from this machine's connection. The amount is corroborated; the ordinance number is not confirmed and is therefore not printed anywhere on this site. It will be, from the ordinance itself.
• Ferry departure times conflict. Two sources disagree on which direction sails in the morning, and neither is Montenegro Shipping Lines. Both claims are published side by side rather than resolved.
• Private rates are single-source. Only one indexed operator publishes private charter pricing, so those rows are one operator's price, not a range.
• Most island stops have no verified detail beyond which tour visits them. Those pages say so.

5. How often it is re-collected

Every page on this site prints the date its data was collected, including this one. When a collection is re-run, the dates move and the sitemap tells search engines the page changed. A price index whose freshness you cannot check is just an opinion, so the date is on every page rather than in a footer nobody reads.

If the oldest source in the Index passes six months, the build prints a staleness warning. That is a deliberate nag.

6. Corrections

If a figure is wrong, tell us and it gets checked against the next collection. Corrections from people who are actually in El Nido — a fee that changed, a route that stopped running — are the most valuable thing this site can receive. Contact.

7. Citing the Index

Free to quote, including commercially. Please link to the page you took the figure from. Suggested credit: El Nido Digital Price Index, 26 August 2026.

8. Every source currently in the Index

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