Scheduled ferry crossings with operator-published fares

Version 1.0.0 · CC BY 4.0 · Read 12 September 2026

Every scheduled departure we could observe on 2,190 directed port pairs, with the ship that sails it and the price its operator was charging on the day it was read.

How it was built

• Ask the graph where ships goEach port in the register is asked, by its exact name, which ports it has direct connections to. Asking by code returns the wrong port: the code Barcelona itself uses answers with a port in Croatia. The port the service answers for is checked against the port asked about, and a substitution is discarded.
• Ask each pair for real departuresEvery pair the graph named is asked for trips on four dates spread across the bookable window. Ferry inventory opens roughly two to three weeks ahead, and each pair keeps the earliest date that answered.
• Write down what came backDeparture, arrival, operator, vessel and every quoted accommodation price are recorded as returned, in integer minor units. Nothing is normalised onto a house vocabulary, nothing is averaged, and nothing is filled in. Company names are kept as published even where two spellings are plainly one company.
• Join, compute, and label what was computedPorts are matched to settlements for coordinates, distances are computed, counts are counted. Each of those is marked at the column level, so a reader can see exactly which numbers came from an operator and which came from us.

Real rows

Eight sailings from sailings.csv, one per operator, in the order the file holds them. Open the file and you will find these.

Times are the clock times the operator published, shown exactly as they came. Fares are the cheapest accommodation class quoted on that sailing.

Cite this

Attribution is the licence condition and the only thing we ask. Either form below is fine.

@dataset{orlero_ferry_crossings_1_0_0,
  author    = {{Orlero}},
  title     = {{Scheduled ferry crossings with operator-published fares}},
  year      = {2026},
  version   = {1.0.0},
  publisher = {Orlero},
  url       = {https://orlero.com/data/ferry-crossings},
  note      = {CC BY 4.0}
}

Identifier

What it does not tell you

• A snapshot, not a feed. A fare is what the operator published at the moment it was read.
• An empty crossing is not proof of no service: four probed dates can miss a weekly sailing.
• Coordinates are settlement centroids, not berths. Athens resolves to Piraeus and Rome to Civitavecchia, so a computed distance is between towns and is a lower bound on the sailed track.
• UN/LOCODEs are assigned by shape, not looked up. A code counts as one when it is five characters and its country prefix agrees with the register. Join on the raw operator code if you need certified codes.
• GTFS and Parquet are left to a later release, because four probed dates do not support a service calendar.
• The timestamps are local clock times stamped as UTC, recorded exactly as published, and the port file carries an IANA zone to resolve them. It affects the 390 sailings whose two ports sit in different zones.
• 0 sailings have no duration: their published arrival is not after their published departure, so both timestamps stay as published and the computed column is empty.