About this site

Looking at the Loop from the railing of the State Street bridge at dusk, with Marina City on the left. — On the State Street bridge, 15 July 2025.

The Chicago Guidebook is written by Diego Fresno. I am an SEO consultant from Spain who builds a small number of travel sites about places I have been, and this is one of them.

What I have actually done in Chicago

I spent four days there in July 2025. I am a visitor, not a resident, and everything on this site is written from that position. In that week I took one architecture cruise on the river, went up both Skydeck and 360 Chicago, and walked a great deal of the Loop and the riverwalk. I paid for all of it myself. Nobody has given me a free ticket, a press pass or a night in a hotel, and if that ever changes the page in question will say so at the top.

There is one thing I cannot tell you, and it is worth being blunt about because it goes to the heart of how this site works. I do not know which of the four cruise companies I sailed with. I did not write it down, and the video I shot from the bow shows no logo, no name board and no flag. So the cruise comparison on this site is built from what each company publishes on its own booking pages, not from my memory of one afternoon. That is a weaker basis, and saying so is better than inventing a stronger one.

Why a site about Chicago

Because the search results for the things people actually spend money on in Chicago are owned almost entirely by the people selling the tickets. Search for the architecture boat tour and you get four operators, a booking platform and a Reddit thread. Nobody sitting outside that trade has put the four companies in one table and said which is worth the money and why. That gap is the whole reason this site exists.

How the pages are built

Every figure comes from the company that charges it, read on its own page on a date printed under the table. No reseller is used as a price source. When two official pages disagree, both go in with their dates. When something has not been measured, it does not appear at all: you will not find queue times on this site, because I have not stood in those queues with a stopwatch.

The longer version of that, including the mistakes that shaped it, is on how we verify.

Photographs

Most of the pictures here are mine, taken on 14 and 15 July 2025, and they are unretouched beyond cropping. Where a photograph is not mine it comes from Wikimedia Commons under a free licence and is credited with its author and licence underneath. The observation deck pages use Commons photographs because I went up both towers and, being honest about my own habits, took pictures of neither.

Money

Some links on this site earn a commission. That never decides what gets recommended, and the two articles published so far both recommend an option we earn nothing from. The full version is on the affiliate disclosure page.

Corrections

If a price here is wrong, or an operator has changed something, tell me and I will fix it and say what it said before. That is what the contact page is for. Corrections to published figures are noted in the author box of the page they affect, not silently swapped.