We are paid at the end of the tour, in cash or by card. No deposit, no card details up front. No booking fee. No "free cancellation up to 24 hours" caveat with a hold on your card anyway. Nothing is charged until you have walked Ephesus and we have brought you back to the port.
That is genuinely unusual in our industry. The standard model is a 25%-50% deposit at booking and the balance on the day. Some operators charge in full. The shore-excursion desk on your cruise ship takes payment immediately and adds it to your stateroom folio. The pay-after-tour model is rare enough that most cruise guests assume there must be a catch when they first read it.
There isn't a catch. Here is the actual reason.
The risk model is different for cruise guests
Most tour-industry deposits exist to cover no-show risk. A guest who books a tour, doesn't show up, and is unreachable costs the operator the guide's day, the vehicle, the fuel, the entry tickets the guide had to buy in advance, and the booking slot another guest could have taken. The deposit is what makes it a real commitment.
Cruise guests are a different category. You have a ship that is scheduled to leave the port at a specific time and you are going to be on it. The no-show rate among cruise guests is effectively zero, in 33 years of operation we have had two, both of whom WhatsApped us from quarantine and were entirely understood. The pre-booked guide will be at Starbucks whether you turn up or not; the cost of a no-show to us is one wasted day for that guide. The cost of a deposit-free booking model to the operator is essentially the cost of pricing the tour to absorb that occasional waste. We do that.
What pay-after actually changes
For the guest: removing the deposit removes the single thing that makes a foreign-operator booking feel risky. Most of the questions we used to get on the old site ("is this real?", "will my card be charged again?", "what's the cancellation policy?") disappear. You inquire, we confirm, you show up, we walk the tour, you pay. The cognitive load drops to roughly zero.
For us: the conversion rate on our inquiry form went up materially. Guests who would have spent the night before port hesitating decide overnight that there's nothing to hesitate about. That's the actual reason we kept the model after testing.
What stays the same
The licensed Türsab #2290 operation. The English-speaking archaeology-trained guides. The private vehicle from your ship to the Upper Gate of Ephesus and back. The skip-the-line entry. The Pay After Your Tour line is the difference at the booking moment; everything else about the tour day is what we have been running since 1992.
How to book under this model
Find a tour on this site, click Request booking, fill in your name, email, ship name, date, and how many travelling. The form lands as an email and an Airtable record on our ops board. A real person on our team replies the same day, usually within hours during port-day operating windows. We confirm the meet time, you forward the confirmation to your travelling party, and we see you at Starbucks on tour day.
If for any reason something changes between booking and tour day, send us a WhatsApp on +90 532 324 2489 and we adjust. We have rebooked tours four hours before they were due to start when a cruise itinerary changed at sea. There is no charge for any of it because there is no card on file to charge.
What about online payment in the future
We are not against it. Garanti BBVA's virtual POS gateway is the standard Türkiye-based card processor and we plan to add it as an option, for guests who genuinely prefer to pre-pay, once the integration is ready. The default will remain pay-after-tour. That is the position the brand is built around.
