Terms of use

What this site is

River Water Watch publishes water levels and disruption forecasts for the rivers European cruises sail on. It's an independent guide, free to use. We are not a cruise line, a travel agent, or a waterway authority, and none of them have reviewed or endorsed what we publish. No cruise line pays to be here.

Information, not advice

Everything here is information. Our numbers are odds, worked out from official readings, thirty years of records, and a daily forecast. A month we score at 20% usually goes fine, and a month we score at 5% occasionally doesn't. That's the nature of odds, and we'd rather tell you that plainly than pretend otherwise.

Booking, insuring, moving, or canceling a trip is your decision. Your contract is with your cruise line, and what happens on a disrupted sailing, the rerouting, ship swaps, and refunds, is governed by their terms, not ours. If the water matters to a decision you're about to make, confirm with your cruise line before you act.

This site is for trip planning. It is not a navigation tool, and nobody should steer a vessel with it.

Accuracy and its limits

We work from the best public sources there are, and we recompute every morning. Even so, we can be wrong. Forecasts are probabilities. Our historical counts are modeled river flow, not the numbers painted on the gauge boards. The sources sometimes publish late, revise a reading, or go down, and our own morning update can fail. Every page shows the date its numbers were made, so you can always see how fresh they are. How we work it all out is on how it works.

Email alerts

Alerts are free. You only get emails after you click the confirmation link we send, which is how we know the address is really yours. We send at most one email a day about a cruise, plus a short note 30 days and 7 days before you sail. Every email carries a stop link, and clicking it deletes your alert then and there.

Alerts are sent on a best-effort basis. Email can be delayed, filtered, or lost, and our morning run can fail, so please don't let an alert be the only way you'd hear about the water before a trip. We may retire the alerts service one day; if we do, the emails simply stop.

Your details

For alerts we store the email address you give us, your river or route, and your dates. Nothing else. We use them only to send the alerts you asked for, and we never sell them or share them, beyond the two services that do the mechanical work for us: Resend, which delivers the email, and Upstash, which stores the record. The stop link deletes the record. Signups that are never confirmed delete themselves after three days, and records are removed after the cruise has sailed.

The site sets no cookies and runs no advertising trackers. Visits are counted with Vercel Analytics, which works without cookies and doesn't identify you.

Using our numbers

Quote us. Our pages, numbers, and charts may be quoted and republished with credit to River Water Watch, ideally with a link. The open data at /data and the assistant server described on the AI page are free to use on the same terms. Please don't alter our numbers and still present them as ours.

Our sources carry their own notices. Gauge readings come from PEGELONLINE, Wasserstraßen- und Schifffahrtsverwaltung des Bundes (Datenlizenz Deutschland, Namensnennung 2.0) and from Vigicrues, Ministère de la Transition écologique (Licence Ouverte). Flow records and forecasts contain modified Copernicus Emergency Management Service information; neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use of this information. Rainfall figures are ERA5 data via Open-Meteo.

Liability

The site is provided as it is, free of charge, and without warranties. To the extent the law allows, we accept no liability for losses that come from relying on it: a trip booked or not booked, a change fee, a missed or late alert, or time the site was down or wrong. Nothing on this page excludes any liability that the law does not permit us to exclude.

Changes, law, and reaching us

We'll update these terms as the site grows, and this page always carries its date. These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. Questions or requests about your details: write to alerts@riverwaterwatch.com or reply to any email we've sent you.