Chicago, Illinois
Every price here was read off the page of the company that charges it, on a date printed under the table. Where the operators contradict each other, we print the contradiction.
Two decisions account for most of a first Chicago trip, and the search results for both are owned by the people selling the ticket. These are the pages that answer them instead.
01 · The one that matters
Four companies, four docks and a spread that runs from $39 to $57. The cheapest is not the shortest, and one of them charges a dollar less for fifteen minutes more. What actually separates them is who is talking.
Prices read September 2026
02 · Pick one, not both
One looks cheaper until you notice what is included. The glass floor is part of the ticket at one of them and a $15 upgrade at the other, which turns a $2 gap into a $13 one.
Both visited July 2025
Photo: Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
03 · Coming next
The cruise season is not the calendar year: the Chicago Architecture Center runs March to November and the others do not all match. We are measuring the rest before publishing anything.
In progress
Every figure comes from the operator that charges it, read on its own booking page on a date we print. No reseller is ever used as a price source: their prices drift and go stale.
When two official pages give different numbers for the same thing, both appear with their date. Quietly picking one is how guides get copied into being wrong.
No tours we have not taken, no queue times we have not measured, no best of anything. The author box on each page says what was checked, when, and what was not.