How we measure
Travel prices are the easiest thing in the world to make up, and almost nobody shows their working. Here is ours.
Every price carries three things
A price on this site is never a number on its own. It carries the date it was observed, the platform it came from, and the query that produced it — the same dates, the same occupancy, the same filters, every time. If we cannot give you those three, we do not publish the number.
We started a year early
Price recording began in August 2026, roughly a year before the eclipse. That is deliberate. A site launched in spring 2027 can show you today's price; it can never show you what the same trip cost twelve months earlier. The curve is the part that tells you whether you are looking at a good deal or at a panic.
Readings are taken on a fixed schedule rather than when a figure would be convenient, and the early manual readings are labelled as such, at lower confidence, so you can tell them from the automated ones.
Two adults, and the solo traveller measured separately
Lodging is quoted for two adults sharing, because that is what most of this stock is priced as. The cost for one person travelling alone is measured separately, never derived by halving. In this part of the world a whole unit costs the same whether one or two people sleep in it, so dividing would understate the solo cost by roughly a factor of two.
Never a conclusion from a single platform
An early analysis of one booking platform said a certain Egyptian city was priced out of reach entirely. Changing platform showed that was wrong. So a claim about availability now names the platform it is true on — "on this platform, this share of stock is gone" — and never asserts that a place is full in general. One inventory is an observation. It is not a conclusion.
Freshness, stated plainly
| Label | Age | What we allow ourselves to say |
|---|---|---|
| Fresh | 7 days or less | May be called a deal, with the exact date shown |
| Aging | 8 to 14 days | Usable, shown with a warning |
| Historical | Over 14 days | Kept as an observation, never called a deal |
Eclipse times come from calculation, not from the web
Durations of totality, contact times and whether a given spot falls inside the path are computed from published astronomical elements, never copied from another website and never taken from a travel company. Every figure on this site is checked against NASA's own trajectory table before it is published. Today that calculation runs on our side and you see its result; the calculator you can point at your own coordinates is being built, and this page will say so plainly when it goes live.
Rankings do not follow commissions
There is no advertising and no affiliate commission on this site at launch. If commercial arrangements ever appear, they will be disclosed on this page, and the ordering of recommendations will not depend on them. A ranking that can be bought is not a ranking.
When we are wrong
Prices move and inventories change. Where a figure has been superseded we replace it and keep the observation date visible, so you can always see how old the ground under a recommendation is.