About us
About Cape Cod Attractions
A 65-mile hooked peninsula with four distinct stretches and three coasts that swim nothing alike — forty miles of protected Atlantic shore, warm tidal flats inside the hook, and whales feeding five miles off Provincetown.
UnsplashCape Cod Attractions is an independent guide to Cape Cod. We are a small editorial team, not a tourism board, not a booking agency and not the operator of anything you will read about here. We publish 32 places, 22 category guides and 10 long-form guides about one destination, and nothing else — which is the whole point.
Cape Cod is a 65-mile arm of glacial debris that curls north and then west into the Atlantic, and the most useful thing to understand before you book anything is that where you land on that arm decides what kind of holiday you get. Barnstable County's fifteen towns sort into four stretches locals use as shorthand and nobody explains to visitors. The Upper Cape — Bourne, Sandwich, Falmouth, Mashpee — sits at the shoulder by the canal and is closest to the mainland. The Mid Cape covers Barnstable, Yarmouth and Dennis, and is where the year-round Cape lives: Hyannis has the hospital, the ferry docks and the supermarkets. The Lower Cape bends at the elbow through Harwich, Brewster, Chatham and Orleans. The Outer Cape — Eastham, Wellfleet, Truro, Provincetown — is the forearm running up to the fist, narrow enough in places to see water on both sides of the highway.
- 32Places covered
- 22Category guides
- 10Long-form guides
- 8news posts
Why this exists
What an aggregator cannot tell you
Search almost any destination and you get the same four kinds of page: a booking platform's auto-generated list, a content farm rewriting that list, a hotel chain selling you a room, and a forum thread from 2016. All four can tell you that the Cape has beaches. None of them can tell you which car park fills first on a Saturday, which crossing is unpleasant on a bike, which much-recommended attraction is not worth the drive, or which month the water is actually warm enough to swim in.
That is the gap this site is built to fill. Everything here is written to be useful to someone with a specific decision to make — which beach, which morning, which boat, with which people — and we would rather publish a page that tells you not to bother than one that is enthusiastic about everything.
One destination, in depth
We do not cover the world. Every page on this domain is about Cape Cod, which is why we can afford to check things that a hundred-destination site never could.
No page per listing
We deliberately do not generate a page for every bookable tour. It would be duplicate content, it would cannibalise our own guides, and it would put a pointless click between you and the booking. Tours appear on the pages that explain them.
Downsides in writing
Crowds, parking fees, seasonal closures, biting insects, the hour the traffic turns. A guide that only says nice things is an advert, and you can already tell the difference.
Free things get the same effort
Public beaches, town parks and free trails earn us nothing and are researched exactly as hard as the things that do. It is the simplest test of whether any of the rest of this is true.
How it is made
How this guide is researched
How we work
How this guide is researched
Every page on Cape Cod Attractions starts from a primary source — the agency that runs the land, the operator that runs the boat, the ordinance that governs the parking — and not from another guide's summary of it. Where a fact is volatile, we date it and tell you to check. Where we could not confirm something, we say that instead of guessing, because a confident wrong answer about a closing time costs you an afternoon.
Disclosure
Our news is machine-written. We label it.
The news feed on Cape Cod Attractions is generated by software from sources we have already verified, not typed by a reporter. Every factual claim in a generated article is traced back to a named source before it publishes, an editor can override or delete any of it, and each article says on its face how it was written. Our guides, category pages and attraction write-ups are a different thing entirely: those are written and edited by the people on our masthead.
The money
How Cape Cod Attractions is paid
Book a tour from one of our links and Viator pays us for it. The fare is the same as going direct. What we put in front of you is decided before anyone is paid anything.
The masthead
Who writes it
Every guide and every article on Cape Cod Attractions is signed. These are the bylines you will see.
Margaret Thorne
Senior Editor
Margaret has edited New England travel coverage for fourteen years and owns the practical pages here: which town sells a beach sticker to whom, what the Sagamore queue does to a Friday in July, and which half of the Cape is shut in February. She quotes fees as bands because…
Silas Crowell
Outdoors & Ocean Editor
Silas crewed whale-watch boats out of Provincetown before he wrote about them, and still reads Massachusetts Bay by the wind rather than the calendar. He covers the National Seashore, the three coasts, the surf and the cold, and he treats the shark guidance and the federal…
Nadia Petrakis
Culture & History Editor
Nadia writes the Cape's older layers: Hawthorne's art school and the Provincetown painters, Marconi's wireless masts on the Wellfleet bluff, Sandwich glass, and the Kennedy summers in Hyannis Port. She has catalogued for a county historical collection, prefers a primary source…
Straight answers
What we are not
Not the operator, and not the merchant
We do not run tours, take bookings, hold your money or issue refunds. When you book, your contract is with the operator through our booking partner, and their terms are the ones that apply. If something goes wrong on a trip, they are who you need — though we would still like to hear about it.
Not a review site
We publish no user reviews and we have never written a fake one. Star ratings you see on a tour come from our booking partner's verified bookings and are labelled as theirs. Our own verdicts are signed by an editor and argued for in writing.
Not official, and not affiliated
We are not connected to any tourism authority, chamber of commerce, park service or local government in Cape Cod. We read what they publish and we link to it; nobody approves a page before it goes out.
Not infallible
Prices move, operators sell up, a free lot starts charging. Every page carries a visible last-updated date so you can weigh it, and a correction takes about a minute to send.
Who we are and how we work
- Editorial standards
How we research, verify, label and correct what we publish.
- How we make money
The affiliate relationship, stated plainly.
- Our writers
The bylines on this site, and what each of them covers.
- Contact
Corrections, questions and press enquiries.
Prefer to start reading rather than reading about us? The the Cape homepage is where most people begin, and the attractions directory has everything we cover in one filterable list.