What counts as a balloon flight
A row is a single bookable product sold by a single storefront for a single launch site. Where the company that flies the balloon and the company that sold the seat are different, the row names both, because the price and the cancellation rule belong to the storefront and the basket belongs to the operator.
Where each figure comes from
Price, basket size, minutes aloft and inclusions are read from the operator’s own page where one exists, and from its GetYourGuide, Viator or Civitatis listing where it does not. Every row carries the date it was read. We do not estimate a price, convert an old one forward, or average across products to fill a gap: a missing value stays missing.
Minutes aloft are kept separate from the total length of the morning, because a four-hour booking that includes a hotel pickup, a wait on the field and a certificate ceremony may be fifty minutes of flight.
Weather-cancellation and refund rules are quoted from the terms that actually apply, not paraphrased, and the row says whose terms they are.
Ratings are a dated snapshot of what the marketplace showed on the day we read it. They are not our assessment, and they are never used to order a table.
The flight-odds layer
The share of mornings a flight goes ahead, by site and by month, is the column this index exists for.
Where a launch site publishes a daily flight-status record and its reuse terms allow it, the figure is a count of those records, and the row says so and names the source. Where no such record exists, the figure is modelled from wind and fog climate normals published by national meteorological services, and the row says that too, with the width of its error.
A counted figure and a modelled figure never share a column. Before any flight-odds figure appears on the site, the source for each site and that source’s reuse terms will be named here.
Expected cost of a flight that actually goes ahead is ours: the price divided by the odds for that site and month, adjusted for whether a cancellation ends in a refund or a rebooking. It is a model, not a measurement. Its formula will be printed here before it is published, and it will always be labelled as a derived figure.
What we will not claim
We do not forecast tomorrow morning. We do not rank operators by anything other than the columns in the table. We do not list an operator higher because we are paid for its bookings, and the affiliate relationship is set out on the disclosure page. We do not use the programme of any site that competes with this one as a comparison publisher.
How often it is re-checked
Core sites are re-checked monthly and the rest every two months. The flight-odds layer is recomputed twice a year. The re-check date on a row is the date the row was read, not the date the page was built.
Corrections
Operators and readers can write to the address on the contact page. A corrected row keeps its history: we change the value and the date, and say what changed.
License
Row snapshots may be quoted with attribution to Hot Air Balloon Index and a link to this page. All other rights reserved.