USA · Florida & the Caribbean · Las Olas & the New River
The five boats bookable here leave from four different places, one of them forty kilometres inland — and the cheapest way to spend a whole day afloat is a scheduled transport service, not a tour.
Quick answer
A whole day on the water here costs $38. That is the Water Taxi all-day pass, and it is not a sightseeing lap — watertaxi.com runs it as a hop-on service across more than thirty stops, 10:00 to 22:00, seven days a week, with a captain narrating as you go. The nearest thing to a conventional cruise, the Millionaire's Row run with drinks, is $36 for seventy-five minutes. Two dollars separates them, and that gap is the argument of this page.
Above them sit a two-hour evening cruise at $50, the best-rated boat here at 4.7★, and a private yacht at $399 for the hull rather than the seat. The fifth listing is the odd one: the Sawgrass Park airboat at $33 is an Everglades trip in Weston, forty kilometres west of the New River, with no city dock at all.
Two local rules set the pace of everything that floats downtown: the New River drawbridges open on a federal schedule, and from mid-November the Intracoastal drops to manatee speed. Both are below, with the arithmetic on what the water taxi replaces and what it does not.
Compare
The five bookable boats on the things that actually differ: time out, which water it covers, the listed price and the condition that settles it. Figures are the operators' own, from the listings below, re-checked in September 2026.
| Boat | Time out | Where it goes | From | What decides it | Book |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sawgrass Park airboat | 40 min | Everglades sawgrass, 40 km west | $33 | You want alligators, not yachts — and you can drive | Details |
| Millionaire's Row with drinks | 75 min | New River and the Intracoastal | $36 | One narrated loop, drinks in hand, back for lunch | Details |
| Water Taxi all-day pass | 10:00–22:00 | New River, Intracoastal, Hollywood | $38 | You want to get off the boat and eat somewhere | Details |
| Evening downtown cruise | 2 hours | Downtown New River after dark | $50 | Highest rated here, and the river empties in the evening | Details |
| Private yacht charter | 2 – 6 hours | Your route, inside or out of the inlet | $399 | Four or more people, or you want the ocean | Details |
The boats
Five boats, one of the thinner ports on this site — which is why the blocks below spend more time on docks, bridges and fares than on choosing between listings. Prices are per person unless the entry says private, where the figure buys the hull. Re-checked in September 2026.
4.3★ (2260 reviews) · 40 minutes · from $33
4.4★ (498 reviews) · 75 minutes · from $36
4.4★ (116 reviews) · 1 day · from $38
4.7★ (62 reviews) · 2 hours · from $50
4.7★ (37 reviews) · 2 - 6 hours · from $399
The docks
Fort Lauderdale has no single tour harbour. Sightseeing boats board on the New River downtown, the big riverboat boards at the beach, the water taxi boards anywhere on its own network, and the airboat does not board in the city at all.
The New River, downtown. The narrated cruises load here — the Millionaire's Row boat and the evening cruise both work the river through the middle of the city. The docks sit close together and are confusingly named: Riverfront Cruises boards at Las Olas Riverfront, 300 SW 1st Avenue, Carrie B a few hundred metres downstream at 440 North New River Drive East on the Riverwalk side. Both are a walk from Las Olas Boulevard; the city's garages charge $3 an hour.
Bahia Mar Yachting Center, 801 Seabreeze Blvd. The Jungle Queen has run from here since 1935: 90-minute sightseeing departures at 12:30 and 14:30 on weekdays, an extra 16:30 on Mondays and Tuesdays, the island dinner cruise at 18:00 Wednesday to Sunday. Marina parking is complimentary for its passengers, which no downtown dock offers, and the box office is cashless.
The Water Taxi network. The day pass has no home pier. Ten stops serve Fort Lauderdale — F1 Riverside Hotel and Stranahan House, F2 Shops and Restaurants at Las Olas, F3 15th Street Fisheries, F4 Hilton Marina, F5 Pier Sixty-Six, F6 Marina Village at Bahia Mar, F7 Las Olas Landing, F8 GalleryOne DoubleTree, F9 Hugh Taylor Birch State Park, F10 Shooters Waterfront, F11 Bokampers — plus a whistle stop at Seville Street on demand. F4 doubles as H2 on the Hollywood route.
Sawgrass Recreation Park, 1006 North US Highway 27, Weston. The airboat listing departs forty kilometres west, on the edge of the water conservation area. No dock, no bus, no water taxi: you drive, or buy a transfer separately.
| Boarding point | What leaves from it | Distance from Las Olas Boulevard | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| New River docks, downtown | Narrated sightseeing and evening cruises | Walking distance | Several docks within a few hundred metres — the voucher names the address |
| Bahia Mar Yachting Center | Jungle Queen sightseeing and dinner cruises | 4 km east, or Water Taxi stop F6 | Free passenger parking; cashless box office; arrive 45 minutes early |
| Any Water Taxi stop, F1 – F11 | All-day pass boats and the Hollywood route | F2 is on Las Olas itself | First come, first served — a full boat means 30 to 45 minutes' wait |
| Sawgrass Recreation Park, Weston | Everglades airboats | 40 km west by road | Reservations required; last airboat 17:00, most run to 15:30 |
| Port Everglades cruise terminals | Cruise ships and one Bahamas ferry | 5 km south | No day boat tours load here |
The arithmetic
This is the comparison that matters here, because the cheap alternative is not a stripped-down tour — it is a bigger day out for almost the same money, on figures published by watertaxi.com and by the cruise operator itself.
The Water Taxi all-day pass is $38 for an adult, $18 for children five to eleven and free under five. It runs 10:00 to 22:00 daily, boats arrive every 30 to 45 minutes, and it covers more than thirty stops — ten in Fort Lauderdale, twelve in Pompano, eight on the water trolley and one in Hollywood. The Millionaire's Row cruise is $36 for seventy-five minutes, drinks included, one circuit, back where you started.
Two adults pay $76 for a whole day of boats or $72 for an hour and a quarter. The catch is boarding: first come, first served, and advance tickets give preferred boarding but not a reserved seat, so a full boat on a February afternoon means waiting for the next. The pass buys no drinks, no fixed narration and no guaranteed route. Watertaxi.com also sells an evening pass after 17:00 at $25.
The airboat works differently. Sawgrass Recreation Park charges $30.95 at its own gate for adults and $20.95 for children four to twelve, and that admission already includes the airboat and the animal sanctuary — so the $33 listing is a markup of about two dollars. Neither figure covers getting to Weston, where a rental car or transfer costs more than the ticket. At the other end, the private yacht at $399 for two to six hours is $66 a head across six people, less per person than the evening cruise.
Prices
Three bands, from the five listings on this page rather than a market average. The spread is unusually narrow at the bottom and wide at the top.
Three of the five boats sit inside five dollars of each other: the Everglades airboat at $33, the Millionaire's Row cruise at $36, the all-day Water Taxi pass at $38. They are not variations on one product — one is freshwater and inland, one a narrated loop, one a transport network you use all day.
The two-hour downtown cruise is the highest-rated boat here at 4.7★ over 62 reviews, and the premium buys the time of day rather than a better hull: river traffic has stopped, the rush-hour bridge restrictions have lifted, the mansions and skyline are lit.
The private yacht is priced for the hull, two to six hours. For two people it makes no sense against a $36 seat; for six it lands near $66 each, and it is the only listing here that can take you out through the inlet into open Atlantic.
Bridges
Federal regulation, not the captain, decides how far up the New River a boat gets and when. The schedule is set in 33 CFR 117.313 and is worth reading before you book a time slot.
Four drawbridges cross the New River in the stretch tour boats use: SE Third Avenue at mile 1.4, Andrews Avenue at 2.3, the Florida East Coast railroad bridge at 2.5 and the Marshall (Seventh Avenue) bridge at 2.7. The road bridges open on signal at almost any hour, with one exception that catches afternoon sailings: they need not open between 07:30 and 09:00 or 16:30 and 18:00, Monday to Friday, federal holidays excepted.
The railway bridge is the real constraint. It normally sits open, closing for trains, and the rule requires a fixed ten-minute opening each hour, with guaranteed windows at 07:00, 09:00, 16:00, 18:00 and 22:00 plus an extra ten minutes in every hour from noon to 14:59; it may not stay closed longer than sixty consecutive minutes. Andrews Avenue need not open for inbound vessels while the railway bridge is down for a train. Stack those on a busy freight afternoon and boats queue below Andrews — which is why the upriver leg of a seventy-five-minute cruise is short, and why the evening departure gets a cleaner run.
Manatee season
Port Everglades publishes the numbers, and they explain the pace of a winter boat trip here better than any complaint about lazy captains.
Manatee season in Broward County runs from 15 November to 31 March. In that window the port authority reckons more than 1,200 manatees can be present in county waterways — roughly a fifth of Florida's population — drawn to the warm outflow of the Lauderdale power plant cooling lakes in the Dania Cutoff Canal. A 6,000-foot idle-speed zone takes effect in the Intracoastal for those months, slow-speed zones apply year round across the rest of the port's waters, and the FWC has gone further between the Oakland Park Boulevard and Sunrise Boulevard bridges, making that stretch slow speed all year.
So the months that fill the hotels are the months when boats crawl: a seventy-five-minute cruise in January covers less ground than the same cruise in July. There is no manatee viewing area at the port — sightings come from the canals, off the deck of a sightseeing boat or the water taxi, as luck rather than itinerary.
Inside or outside
Fort Lauderdale's boat trips are inland-waterway trips. That is a feature rather than a disappointment, but it is not the expectation most first-time visitors arrive with.
The city carries the Venice of America title on its own seal, on the strength of more than 300 miles of navigable inland waterway locally, around 165 of them inside Fort Lauderdale. The Millionaire's Row cruise, the evening cruise and every water taxi stay on the New River and the Intracoastal — flat and sheltered on days when the beach has a metre of shorebreak. Only the private charter can head out through the Port Everglades inlet, and whether it does is a conversation with the captain. Swell therefore almost never cancels a trip here; rain and lightning do.
Port Everglades
Fort Lauderdale's harbour and Fort Lauderdale's boat-tour docks are two different places, and the confusion costs arriving cruise passengers an afternoon.
Port Everglades is a cruise homeport, one of the busiest anywhere: about 4.77 million cruise guests in fiscal 2025, up 16% on the year, roughly 40 ships from nine lines across eight cruise terminals. What it does not have is a sightseeing fleet — no boat on this page loads at a cruise terminal, and there is no walk-up dock inside the security perimeter. The one scheduled non-cruise service is Baleària's Bahamas ferry, leaving at 09:00 for Bimini, about two hours across, or Freeport at around three: an international crossing with immigration at both ends, not an excursion.
Off a ship for the day, take a car to Water Taxi stop F4, the Hilton Marina on 17th Street barely north of the port, then the day pass. A fixed 75-minute cruise fits a turnaround day too; the Everglades airboat, forty kilometres inland with a drive at each end, does not fit one safely.
Season
Sea temperatures are the monthly averages published by watertemperature.net for the Fort Lauderdale coast; the notes are what each month does to the timetable.
The water taxi runs rain or shine, seven days a week, and the sightseeing boats run all year; what changes is the shape of the day. From June to September the pattern is consistent enough to plan around: clear mornings, cloud from about 13:00, thunderstorms most likely between 15:00 and 18:00, clear again by 19:00. A morning departure in July beats an afternoon one, and an evening cruise often sails under a sky that has just emptied itself. Hurricane season runs 1 June to 30 November, peaking August to October; a named storm near the coast stops everything and closes the port.
| Month | Sea | Crowds | What it means on the water |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 24.6 °C (76 °F) | Peak | Driest month of the year; manatee zones in force, so boats crawl |
| February | 24.5 °C (76 °F) | Peak | Coolest water of the year; water taxis fill on weekend afternoons |
| March | 24.8 °C (77 °F) | Peak | Lowest humidity; spring-break traffic hits the beach, not the river |
| April | 25.8 °C (78 °F) | Busy | Slow-speed season ends 31 March, so boats move properly again |
| May | 27 °C (81 °F) | Easing | Warm water, no storms yet, queues down — the sweet spot |
| June | 28.5 °C (83 °F) | Quiet | Wet season starts; hurricane season opens on 1 June |
| July | 29.4 °C (85 °F) | Quiet | Clear mornings, thunderheads from about 13:00 — take the early slot |
| August | 29.8 °C (86 °F) | Quiet | Warmest water of the year; serious hurricane months begin |
| September | 29.4 °C (85 °F) | Quietest | Wettest month by a distance, about 146 mm |
| October | 28.4 °C (83 °F) | Rising | Storms ease; the last week is often the year's best value |
| November | 26.8 °C (80 °F) | Rising | Hurricane season closes on 30 November, manatee zones open on 15 November |
| December | 25.7 °C (78 °F) | Peak | Evening cruises sell out around the holidays |
Extras
No marine reserve ticket, no harbour tax. The extra money goes on parking, on reaching a dock, and on drinks — and one listing includes an admission you might pay twice.
| Item | Amount | Who collects it | When it applies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Downtown parking | $3 per hour | City of Fort Lauderdale garages | Any New River departure if you drive; beach lots run higher |
| Parking at Bahia Mar | Complimentary for passengers | Bahia Mar Yachting Center | Jungle Queen sailings only |
| Getting to Weston | Car hire, fuel or a private transfer | You, or the transfer operator | The airboat listing; no bus or water taxi serves the park |
| Sawgrass admission | Already included | Sawgrass Recreation Park | Gate price is $30.95 adult, $20.95 child 4–12, airboat included |
| Drinks beyond the included round | Boat prices | The operator | 'With drinks' normally means a set number, not an open bar |
| Water Taxi child fare | $18, ages 5–11; free under 5 | Water Taxi | Family day passes — the adult figure is not per household |
On the water
The narrated cruises work the New River downtown; Bahia Mar and most water taxi stops are out on the Intracoastal; Port Everglades is south of both and sends out no day boats. The airboat departure is forty kilometres west, off the map.
Questions
For a full day, yes, by a wider margin than most cities offer. The all-day pass is $38 against $36 for a single 75-minute narrated cruise, and it runs 10:00 to 22:00 across more than thirty stops with captains narrating as they go. The catch is boarding: first come, first served, so on a busy winter afternoon a full boat means waiting 30 to 45 minutes. With only ninety minutes free, the fixed cruise is the better buy.
There is no single one. Narrated sightseeing boats board on the New River downtown, where Riverfront Cruises uses the Las Olas Riverfront dock at 300 SW 1st Avenue and Carrie B uses 440 North New River Drive East on the Riverwalk. The Jungle Queen boards at Bahia Mar Yachting Center, 801 Seabreeze Blvd, out by the beach. The water taxi boards at any of its own stops. Your voucher gives a street address — use that, not the neighbourhood name.
No. Port Everglades handled about 4.77 million cruise guests in fiscal 2025 across eight cruise terminals, and none is a sightseeing dock — there is no walk-up boarding inside the port. The only scheduled non-cruise service is Baleària's 09:00 ferry to Bimini and Freeport, an international crossing rather than an excursion. From a ship, take a car to Water Taxi stop F4 at the Hilton Marina on 17th Street, the nearest boarding point to the terminals.
The narrated loop runs the New River out to the Intracoastal between Las Olas and Port Everglades, past the waterfront houses and the megayachts moored behind them. Ownership claims vary from boat to boat and are worth treating as entertainment. The verifiable landmark is Bahia Mar, where slip F-18 was renamed in 1987 for John D. MacDonald's fictional Travis McGee — though the plaque has since moved off the dock and indoors.
Two separate rules. From 15 November to 31 March, manatee protection puts a 6,000-foot idle-speed zone in the Intracoastal and slow speed across the rest of the port's waters — Port Everglades reckons more than 1,200 manatees, about a fifth of Florida's population, use Broward waterways in those months. Year round, the New River drawbridges control the pace upstream: the railway bridge at mile 2.5 opens for a fixed ten minutes an hour, and the road bridges need not open between 07:30 and 09:00 or 16:30 and 18:00 on weekdays.
No, and it is the most common misread here. The airboat listing runs from Sawgrass Recreation Park at 1006 North US Highway 27 in Weston, forty kilometres west of the coast, on freshwater in the water conservation area. No dock in the city, no bus, no water taxi — the ticket excludes an hour of driving each way. Boats run every 20 to 30 minutes until 15:30, with a final departure at 17:00, and reservations are required.
May, then late October. May gives a 27 °C sea, the slow-speed season over since 31 March and the wet season not yet started. Late October has similar water at 28.4 °C with the storm pattern breaking down and rates still low. January and February are busiest and slowest on the water, 24.5 to 24.6 °C with the manatee zones in force. July and August are warmest, 29.4 and 29.8 °C, with thunderstorms most afternoons; every listing cancels free 24 hours ahead, so a rebooking is cheap.
Nearby
Or browse every boat tour and day cruise by port.
Forty minutes south: Biscayne Bay, sandbar trips and a free city water taxi of its own
Skyline & sightseeing ▸ Key WestUSAThe other end of the Overseas Highway, where the boats finally do go out to reef and open sea
Sunset & reef sailing ▸ NassauBahamasThe Bahamas end of the crossing the Port Everglades ferry makes, without the drive to Bimini
Catamaran & reef sailing ▸