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How We Track Alcatraz Availability

Our methodology, stated plainly

Trust is the product here — you’re paying us to watch something you can’t watch yourself. So here’s exactly what we do, what we count, and where the limits are.

The source

We read the same official inventory that powers the Alcatraz City Cruises booking flow — per-date, per-departure seat counts, not scraped guesses from a rendered page. When the official calendar says a departure has seats, that’s what we record. When it doesn’t, we record that too.

Check frequency

Our monitor polls official inventory every 10 minutes, 24/7. Each cycle covers the Day Tour, Night Tour, Behind the Scenes Tour, and Combo Tour across the full bookable window (about six months). A single cycle is a few dozen lightweight API reads — no browsers, no page scraping.

What counts as a reopening

Our observed reopenings follow strict rules:

• One reopening = a previously unavailable date or departure returning with positive capacity. That’s it.
• Initial availability doesn’t count — only inventory that was gone and came back.
• Failed or ambiguous checks don’t count. A timeout, an incomplete response, or anything we can’t verify is recorded as unknown, never as available or sold out. We’d rather miss a data point than publish a wrong one.
• Repeated cycles can recount. If the same seats sell out and reopen twice, that’s two reopenings. The count measures events, not unique seats.

What the numbers are not

• Not a prediction. Past reopenings don’t guarantee future ones. They’re evidence that cancellations happen regularly — nothing more.
• Not complete inventory. We track the four main tours. Private events, group allocations, and anything outside the public booking flow isn’t in our data.
• Not a held place. An alert tells you a spot existed seconds ago. It doesn’t reserve anything — the fastest booker wins.

What we never do

• We never sell tickets. You book directly with the authorized operator, at face value, in your name.
• We never hold inventory. We couldn’t if we wanted to.
• We never sell your data. Your email exists for your alerts and nothing else.
• We never fake urgency. If our monitor hasn’t seen a reopening, we say so. Watches that never fire cost nothing — there’s nothing to refund, because there was never a charge.