Vancouver Tourism Guide is an independent travel resource about one city and the coast around it. We are not a booking site, a tourism board, or a partner of any hotel, tour operator or transit agency. Nobody pays to appear on these pages, and there is nothing here you can buy from us.
Why a whole site about one city
Vancouver is unusually badly served by general travel writing. It gets treated as a stopover — two days before an Alaska cruise, a night either side of a Whistler trip, an airport you pass through on the way to Banff. So the coverage stays shallow: the Seawall, Granville Island, Capilano, done.
That misses how the city actually works for a visitor. Vancouver is a place where a decision as small as which SkyTrain line you take, or which side of the harbour you sleep on, changes what the trip feels like. Where the difference between a great day and a wasted one is often the forecast — and where the rain that ruins a Grouse Mountain ticket in November is exactly why the rainforest at Lynn Canyon looks the way it does. Where “downtown” means a peninsula, and the sensible way to cross it is a foot-passenger ferry the size of a bathtub.
None of that fits in a listicle. It needs the kind of coverage where somebody has bothered to work out that the Canada Line from YVR runs to Waterfront in about 26 minutes and costs less than a quarter of a taxi, that the fare is zone-based but free after 6:30pm, and that the AddFare on the way out of the airport catches almost everyone once.
How these guides get written
Every guide starts from primary sources rather than from other travel blogs. In practice that means:
- Transit, fares and schedules come from TransLink directly — zone boundaries, Compass Card mechanics, the Canada Line AddFare, SeaBus frequencies.
- Park and trail information comes from the Vancouver Park Board, Metro Vancouver Regional Parks and BC Parks, including the seasonal closures and shuttle-only access that catch people out at Cypress and Seymour.
- Opening hours, admission and closure dates come from each attraction’s own site — the Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver Aquarium, Science World, the Art Gallery, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden — not from aggregators that go stale.
- Civic and safety information comes from the City of Vancouver, and cross-border guidance from the CBSA and CBP, because the rules on what you may carry into Washington State are not intuitive.
- Prices are quoted in Canadian dollars and dated, so you can tell how old a figure is rather than guessing.
Where a guide gives a walking time, a distance, a transit connection or a cost, it is because that specific detail was checked — not carried over from another article. Where something is genuinely a judgement call, we say so, and we try to say what the trade-off is instead of pretending there is one right answer.
What we are careful about
Two things in particular.
Writing honestly about the Downtown Eastside. The area around Main and Hastings has visible poverty, homelessness and drug use, and it sits immediately next to Chinatown and Gastown, where visitors do go. We describe it plainly, because someone walking east along Pender deserves to know what is a block away, and because pretending otherwise leaves people more alarmed when they encounter it. We also try not to write about a neighbourhood of real residents as though it were a hazard on a map.
Indigenous context. Vancouver sits on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. The totem poles at Brockton Point, the collections at the Museum of Anthropology and the Bill Reid Gallery are not scenery, and guides that treat them as photo stops do visitors a disservice. Where we cover Indigenous-led tourism, we point to Indigenous-owned operators and institutions rather than paraphrasing them.
Updating and corrections
Prices, hours and transit details change, and a travel guide that is never revisited quietly becomes wrong. Guides are reviewed on a rolling basis, with priority given to anything seasonal — ski-hill opening dates, festival schedules, cruise-season sailings from Canada Place.
If you find something out of date or simply incorrect, please tell us. Corrections from readers who were standing there last week are more useful than any research process, and we would rather fix a fare table than defend it. Use the contact page.
Independence and funding
There are no affiliate links on this site, no sponsored posts, and no paid inclusion. No hotel, restaurant or tour company has been given, or can buy, a place in a ranking. We intend to fund the site through third-party display advertising; those adverts will be clearly distinguishable from editorial content, and they will have no influence on what we recommend. Our privacy policy explains what that means for your data.
Photography is licensed from Pexels under its free-use licence, with photographers credited on each image.
What this site is not
It is not affiliated with Destination Vancouver, Tourism BC, the City of Vancouver, TransLink or any attraction described here. It cannot book anything for you, hold a reservation, or intervene with an operator on your behalf. It is a reference you read before you go and check while you are there — nothing more, and we try to do that one job properly.