Data

What we have

The dataset is roughly 1,474 JSON files across these categories:

• Port registry — 388 ports. Per-port records including geographic coordinates, pier vs tender categorization, typical operating hours, currency and language norms, taxi cooperatives and rate sheets, accessibility infrastructure, weather windows, primary cruise lines visiting, embassy contact information, and notable on-the-ground hazards or scams. Curated by hand from a mix of cruise-line operational documents, port-authority pages, and first-person reportage.
• Ship registry — 290+ ships across 14+ cruise lines. Per-ship records including class identity, build year, gross tonnage, length, capacity (double-occupancy and max), crew count, IMO number, current homeport, recent drydocks, signature features, and accessibility-relevant cabin counts.
• Venue and menu data — 478 cruise restaurant venues. Per-venue records including cover charge (where applicable), cuisine category, dress code, dietary-accommodation notes, current menu items where the cruise line publishes them, and structural notes (booking required vs walk-up, peak-time waitlist behavior).
• Fleet metadata. Cruise-line registry with current ships, retired ships, sister-ship relationships, and class hierarchies.
• Accessibility metadata. Per-port and per-ship accessibility-relevant fields — cabin types, port-day terrain, tender-port operations, mobility-equipment rental availability.
• Itinerary and deployment schedules. Where ships go and when, derived from cruise-line published deployments. Treated as snapshot data; not real-time.
• Supporting datasets. Distance units, currency reference, time-zone metadata, structured menu items, calculator inputs.

How the data is maintained

• One-author editorial discipline. Records are curated by hand and reviewed against primary sources. The author maintains a running fact-check log; corrections are committed with their source URLs documented.
• ICP-2 v1.4 metadata standard. Every record has a last-reviewed date, an editorial source attribution, and a confidence indicator where claims are derivative or hedge-worthy.
• No bulk-imported third-party datasets. The dataset isn't a scrape of cruise-line marketing materials; it's a hand-curated synthesis of multiple primary sources per record.
• Versioned and auditable. The full history is in git; every record's evolution is traceable to a specific commit and editorial rationale.

What licensing looks like

We don't have a public price list. Each licensing conversation is direct, structured around the use case rather than a per-record menu. The shape of a likely arrangement:

• Attribution required. The licensee credits In the Wake as the data source in any user-facing surface where the data appears. Format is flexible (link, footnote, "data by" credit), but the attribution is non-negotiable.
• Redistribution restricted. The licensee uses the data inside their product or content; they don't republish the dataset itself for downstream use. This is the rule that keeps the asset valuable.
• Use-case scoped. "All ports" for a travel-planning app is different from "all Alaska ports for a one-season tourism feature." Pricing reflects the scope.
• Annual terms. Most licensing arrangements run on annual renewal so both sides can revisit fit; the data evolves and so do the licensee's needs.
• No exclusivity (default). Multiple licensees can use the data simultaneously. Exclusivity is possible but priced separately and rarely the right fit.

Use cases we'd consider

• Travel publishers who need authoritative cruise-port operational data to fill gaps in their own coverage. Particularly useful for publishers covering travel broadly who want cruise content without building a cruise-specific editorial team.
• Fintech and travel-fintech apps needing port currency, time-zone, or local-fee data calibrated for cruisers (which is structured differently from general international travel).
• Accessibility-equipment companies needing port-by-port accessibility metadata for routing and operational decisions.
• Academic researchers studying cruise tourism, port economics, accessibility infrastructure, or AI-search citation patterns. Academic licensing is typically priced significantly below commercial; talk to us.
• AI training partners who recognize that editorially-curated, fact-checked data is materially different from scraped data and is worth licensing rather than scraping. (See our editorial posture for the standards we apply to anything we publish.)

Use cases we won't consider

• Cruise-booking platforms. The bright lines that apply to cruise-line affiliate commissions and shore-excursion booking commissions also apply here. Selling our port and ship data to a cruise-booking platform would compromise the editorial firewall in spirit even if not in letter.
• Programmatic ad-targeting platforms. Using cruise-port or cruise-ship data to target advertising at our audience or theirs is exactly the kind of engagement we built the brand to avoid.
• Resellers / data brokers. If the licensing arrangement's primary purpose is to repackage the data for further sale, the answer is no. The dataset stays valuable because it's not freely circulating.