Which balloon company, and will it even fly?
Price per adult, how many people share the basket, minutes aloft, and how often the balloon actually leaves the ground.
See what the dataset will hold
No operator has been checked yet, at any site. No price, count, rating or date on this site is a measurement.
The column that will set this index apart is the share of mornings a flight goes ahead, by site and month, with counted figures and modelled figures never shared in one column.
A site is published once at least 5 of its operators have been checked.
Nothing on this site is measured yet, and every page says which figures are coming and where from. There is already a good English comparison of balloon operators across dozens of places, so this site is being built where that one is thin: Spanish pages written first rather than translated last, and a monthly flight-odds layer that nobody publishes.
It is published empty on purpose. The pages below set out the fields each table will carry, the source each field comes from and how often it gets re-checked, so the shape can be argued with before any number lands. Every page carries robots noindex and every sitemap is empty until its rows exist.
Destinations
What this page will hold
Nothing on this page is measured yet. These are the fields we will check, where each one comes from, and how often it gets re-checked. No number is published until the first check is done.
Not checked yet
| Field | Source | Re-checked |
|---|---|---|
| Site: Cappadocia, Teotihuacán and Segovia first, then Luxor, Marrakech, Bagan and Jaipur | Editorial, from the niche hypothesis | Once a year |
| Operator that flies the balloon, and the storefront selling the seat | Operator site or marketplace listing | Monthly at core sites, every two months elsewhere |
| Price per adult in local currency and USD, with the date read | Operator site or marketplace listing | Monthly |
| Passengers per basket, compartments, and minutes aloft | Listing text and operator FAQ | Monthly |
| Weather-cancellation rule, quoted, and whose terms it is | Operator or storefront terms and conditions | Monthly |
| Weight limit, minimum age, pickup zones, what is included | Listing text and operator terms | Monthly |
| Share of mornings a flight went ahead, by site and month | Site flight-status records where they exist, otherwise wind and fog climate normals, both named on the methodology page | Twice a year |
| Expected cost of a flight that actually goes ahead | Computed by us from the price, the odds and the refund rule | Monthly |