About Algarve Tours

Who we are

Lead reviewer is Beatriz Coelho, a Lagos-based Turismo de Portugal-licensed tour guide with a BSc in Marine Biology from Universidade do Algarve and 12 years guiding the Algarve coast from Sagres to the Ria Formosa. Beatriz is on the water 180+ days a year and writes every activity + town review herself after a current-season visit.

Editorial oversight, fact-checking, and pricing audits follow a fixed methodology: current-season sampling, licence verification, and pricing checked against operator rate cards, never against aggregator listings.

Why this exists

The coast between Sagres and the Spanish border holds three quite different Algarves, and a visitor with one week has to pick one. Search for help with that and you mostly get listing pages ordered by commission, where every activity is excellent and nothing is ever wrong for anyone. That is not advice, it is a shelf. This site is the other thing: someone who lives here saying which is which, and who each one is not for.

We started this site because we got tired of friends booking the wrong activity for their trip. A €25 Benagil speedboat is incredible for someone with one cruise port-day - and underwhelming for someone who came specifically to photograph the cave at sunrise. We tell you which is which.

How we work

• Quarterly activity sampling across the 3 Algarve regions - West (Sagres / Lagos), Central (Carvoeiro / Albufeira), East (Faro / Tavira). Each major activity sampled in current season.
• Operator audits as fee-paying clients, never disclosed in advance. Guide competence, safety briefing depth, marine-life narration accuracy, and pricing transparency assessed from the buyer's seat.
• Cetacean sighting cross-checks against regional field logs.
• Pricing refreshed quarterly from operator websites + our own bookings. Last-verified date on every activity, town, and price page.
• We never accept hosted trips without disclosing them. If we ever review a comped trip, you'll see "comped" tagged on that review.

How we make money

We earn affiliate commission when you book through GetYourGuide or Viator links on this site. The commission is paid by the platform, not by you — your price is identical whether you click through us or go direct. We disclose this on every page that contains affiliate links.

What we don't do: take bookings, arrange trips, broker introductions to operators, sell ad placements, accept cash or comped trips for placement, or rank operators by commission rate. No operator can buy a position here, and none has ever been offered one.

Editorial policy on operator listings

Every listing is editorial. An operator appears because we paid for its trip and checked its licence, and for no other reason. There is no featured tier, no sponsored slot and no way to buy one, which is why the counter on the front page reads zero and is meant to stay there.

Trust + accuracy

Every activity, town, operator, and guide page shows a "Last verified" date and the verifying author. If you find something out of date - pricing changed, operator closed, link broken — we want to know.

Email hello@algarvetours.org. Verified content is updated within 7 days.