Belize City Cruise Port: Tender Times, Excursion Prices and the All-Aboard Arithmetic

Verified on 24 September 2026, on the Belize Tourism Board’s own cruise-schedule data service, the Belize Port Authority’s port register, NICH’s e-ticketing system, CZMAI, three tour operators’ price lists and a live water-taxi booking. Three figures come from the Belize Tourism Board’s travelbelize.org attraction pages, which we read on 6 September 2026 and which could not be loaded on 24 September 2026; they are marked where they appear.

Belize City is a tender port, and none of the sources we read on 24 September 2026 gives a date when that changes. The Belize Tourism Board calls Fort Street Tourism Village “Belize’s original cruise port” and “a tender port– approximately 15 minutes ship to shore”; Royal Caribbean’s own port page says “Cruise ships anchor outside of Belize City harbor and guests tender in.” The BTB gives passengers “six to eight hours of available time” ashore. UpClose Belize publishes its Lamanai day at eight to nine hours door to door and its Altun Ha and cave-tubing day at about nine — or 10 to 11, or 11 to 12, on other lines of the same page — and says of the Lamanai one that it is “timed to return you well before tender cut-off times.”

That is the whole planning problem here: the excursion menu is longer than the day.

The call in one table

Every figure below is published by the party named beside it and is set out with its source further down this page. Where two parties publish different numbers for the same thing, both are printed and neither is picked.

The excursion prices are the lowest we read from the operators named; where two operators sell the same day at different prices, both are shown. Park and reserve fees are separate from every tour price above unless the operator says otherwise, and only one of them says so.

Belize City cruise calls in 2026, from the Belize Tourism Board’s own schedule

The BTB runs a cruise app; behind it is a data service that returns every scheduled call. We pulled the whole calendar on 6 September 2026 and again on 24 September 2026 — the two downloads are byte-identical — and counted it. Its own last-updated stamp was still 27 August 2026.

Harvest Caye, the other Belize cruise port, carries 118 records for 2026, 112 of them On-Schedule.

January carries more than three times May’s calls. Across those 246 calls the BTB’s records show:

• 156 days of 2026 carry at least one Belize City call — 90 days with one ship, 42 with two, 24 with three. Three is the maximum on any single day.
• 41 distinct vessels. The most frequent is Enchantment of the Seas at 33 calls, then Carnival Liberty 24, Regal Princess 18, Carnival Dream 17, Grandeur of the Seas 15.
• The largest single vessel in the BTB’s 2026 schedule is MSC Seashore at 5,632 passengers, on 5 January 2026.
• Scheduled passenger capacity for the year totals 664,912. The heaviest single day is 27 January 2026 at 10,996.

Two cautions on those figures, both ours. The pax number the BTB carries against each call is a vessel capacity, not a count of people who landed. And of the 246 On-Schedule calls, 169 fall before 24 September 2026 and 77 on or after it — the back end of the table is a schedule, not a record, and the whole table was last updated on 27 August.

One more thing worth knowing before you read anything else about Belize cruise numbers: the BTB’s own prose disagrees with the BTB’s own data. Its cruise page says “There are approximately 333 cruise calls to Belize annually.” Its schedule service returns 407 records for 2026 across both ports, 358 of them On-Schedule. The prose figure carries no year. The same page still advises readers that “the 2022 cruise schedule can be viewed via the BTB Cruise App,” though the app’s data now runs through 2027.

The tender

Fort Street Tourism Village appears in the Belize Port Authority’s register of designated port facilities, “located at the mouth of Halouver Creek.” The BPA publishes no berth count, no tender-dock count and no capacity figure for it.

Two published crossing times exist and they do not agree:

Neither names a ship or a date. Use whichever you like; the difference is 10 minutes on a round trip, and below we show what each does to the day.

None of the sources we read publishes a tender timetable — not the BTB, not the Port Authority, not the cruise lines’ port pages, and the terminal has no website of its own. The BTB’s own advice is to get it from the ship: passengers should “verify the name of their ship as well as the return time of cruise tenders servicing their ship for the day.” There is also no Fort Street Tourism Village website — fortstreettourismvillage.com, fstv.bz and belizecruiseterminal.com all failed to resolve in DNS when we checked on 6 and again on 24 September 2026.

The one published description of where to meet an independent guide comes from an operator, not the terminal: Cave-Tubing.com tells passengers to “exit through terminal 1 on Fort Street,” where guides wait with name signs.

Will the pier change this? Not on any published date

The project once called Stake Bank, then Port Coral, is now Olo Caye. Its developer’s own site says construction began at the Mile 5 mainland staging site in September 2026 — Phase One. Phase Two (“Development of the cruise port and hotel begins”) carries no date, and Phases Three and Four (“Grand opening following rigorous inspections and regulatory clearances”) are each labelled “Coming Soon” with no date attached. The planned facilities include “Dual Piers” and a Tourist Village, with the Mile 5 mainland base “a short 15-minute boat ride away.” The site’s headline figures are $200M of investment, 5,500 construction jobs and about 700 permanent roles, under a disclaimer that everything shown is “artistic simulations for illustrative purposes only.”

The company’s 2 September 2026 announcement — its own words, but issued through the EIN Presswire wire service rather than on its own domain, so we record it as a secondary source — adds that Phase 1 covers “employee lodging, a marina, fueling, storage facilities and more” and that a groundbreaking ceremony is planned “later this year.” Nothing in either the site or the announcement gives a date on which a cruise ship berths at Belize City.

The developer does not entirely agree with itself: its 10 April 2026 announcement said “750 permanent positions”, and its September announcement and its website both say about 700. We print both.

For the government’s position the record is thin and old. The Government of Belize Press Office’s “Statement on Cruise Sector and Ports Development” is dated 19 October 2021 and describes Stake Bank as expecting to be “operational in 2022.” When we searched the Press Office on 6 September 2026 we found no more recent Cabinet statement; on 24 September 2026 its site did not respond to us, so that search could not be repeated. Meanwhile Port of Belize Ltd, the cargo port on the south side of the city whose “proposed cruise terminal” that 2021 statement discussed, advertises cold storage, containers, Ro Ro, break bulk, warehousing, pilotage and bulk cargo — and no passenger service of any kind.

What the excursion targets actually cost, and how far away they are

Distances and drive times first, each from the party that publishes it:

None of the authorities whose pages we read publishes a drive time to Altun Ha, and none of the sources we read gives a distance to Nohoch Che’en. Cave-Tubing.com describes its cave-tubing day as “around 4 hours, with 2 hours spent commuting to and from the Caves Branch Archaeological Reserve,” which puts the round trip at about the same hour each way UpClose gives.

Park and reserve fees you pay whether or not the tour itemises them

The Institute of Archaeology sells entry through its own e-ticketing site, and its terms state “All prices are in Belizean Dollars (BZD)”:

Goff’s Caye is not NICH’s; it is managed by the Coastal Zone Management Authority and Institute, which charges BZ$20 for foreign adults and BZ$10 for Belizeans.

The Belize Zoo charges international visitors BZ$40 for adults and BZ$10 for children aged 3–12. It opens 8:30 AM–5:00 PM Monday to Saturday with last admission at 4:00 PM, and 8:30 AM–4:30 PM on Sundays with last admission at 3:30 PM, closed Good Friday and Christmas Day. Parking and lockers are free, and the zoo says “a proper tour of the Zoo can take between an hour and two hours.”

Two rules from NICH bind what you can book. Cave sites — “specifically the ATM, Barton Creek, and Nohoch Ch’een Caves” — require guided tours for all visitors, group visits “should be booked in advance with a licensed tour operator”, and children must clear a 40-inch height requirement to enter Nohoch Ch’een or ATM. Tickets for Actun Tunichil Muknal specifically must be bought in advance rather than at the gate. Belize’s tour guides and operators are, in the BTB’s words, “legally required to carry a valid license and photo ID.”

Published excursion prices, three tour operators

Cave-Tubing.com — prices in US dollars, cash only, including national park entrance fees, transport from and to the terminal, guide, gear, refreshments and lunch:

Private-transport upgrade: US$20 per person for groups of 10 or more, US$25 for smaller groups with a five-person minimum. A child aged 10 or younger riding an ATV with a parent pays US$75 on the two US$100 tours and US$100 on the US$120 tour. The page’s footer reads “© Copyright 2004 – 2024”, so these prices sit under a 2024 copyright line on a page that is live in 2026.

Belize Cruise Excursions publishes a full cruise-passenger list, in US dollars:

UpClose Belize prices two of the same days higher: Lamanai at US$140 per person (“based on a final group size of 4 persons”) and Altun Ha with cave tubing at US$155 per person, tax-inclusive. It also warns of a cost the others do not mention: water shoes and a waterproof phone pouch rent from on-site cash vendors at the cave park for US$10–US$20, “US or BZ dollars, no coins or US$1 bills.”

So the same cave-tubing day runs US$49 or US$66 depending on which operator sells it, and the same Lamanai day runs US$123 or US$140. Both are the operators’ own published figures for tours to the same reserve and the same ruin.

The mix of currencies is not incidental. Park fees are set in Belize dollars, tour prices are quoted in US dollars, one operator takes only cash, and another names both currencies at the gate — which is why our Belize currency and ATM page is worth reading before you tender in with one banknote type.

The all-aboard arithmetic

Here is the calculation the tour pages do not do for you. Everything in this table is our arithmetic, adding each operator’s own published tour length to a round-trip tender at each of the two published tender times, against the BTB’s stated six-to-eight-hour window ashore.

UpClose’s own page is not consistent about that last day: “approximately 9 hours” in its summary, “approximately 10 to 11 hours” in its description and “11–12 hours” in its note for families. We used the shortest of the three; none of them fits.

Read the middle row carefully. A combination cave-tubing tour at the operator’s own 5h30, plus its own 20-minute tenders, is 6 hours 10 minutes — over a six-hour call before anything goes wrong. That same operator’s tour-details page gives the shorter figure of “around 4 hours” for the cave-tubing day, and its FAQ gives 4.5; we are not choosing between them, and neither does the operator.

The two long tours are the ones to look at hardest. UpClose Belize states its Lamanai day runs “8 to 9 hours door to door” and, on the same page, that the tour “is timed to return you well before tender cut-off times.” Those two statements are hard to hold together inside a six-to-eight-hour window, and the operator does not reconcile them. Belize Cruise Excursions describes the same trip at “5.5 to 6hrs including transport depending on your Ship’s shore times” — a 2.5-to-3.5-hour disagreement between two operators about the same journey. Whichever you book, that is the number to confirm against your own ship’s all-aboard before you pay.

San Pedro on a port day, priced live

We ran a real booking on San Pedro Belize Express’s own engine on 24 September 2026, for travel Wednesday 7 October 2026, one adult, one way, in each direction. USD 34.00, 1 hour 30 minutes, on every sailing in both directions — the same fare and timetable the engine gave us on 6 September for 30 September. At the next step the engine lists an Internet Processing Fee of US$3.74 and a Port Authority Fee of US$1.50 under the US$34.00 subtotal, with no box to untick for either, which makes US$39.24 one way by our sum; the US$25.00 airport transfer it offers after that is optional.

Departures from Belize City Main Terminal: 8:00am, 9:00am, 10:30am, 12:00pm, 1:30pm, 3:00pm, 4:30pm, 5:30pm. Departures from San Pedro Pier: 6:00am, 7:00am, 8:30am, 10:00am, 11:30am, 1:00pm, 3:00pm, 4:30pm.

Three hours afloat, before a minute on the island, before the tenders. Our arithmetic on those published times:

The last row does not fit even the top of the BTB’s window. What Ambergris Caye and San Pedro hold once you get there is a separate question; the timetable is the constraint on a port day. The same booking engine also sells Caye Caulker; the fares and full timetables for the Belize City to Caye Caulker crossing are set out on their own page, and the two islands are set against each other number by number — rooms, rentals, ATMs and reef — on our Caye Caulker versus San Pedro page.

Who else is ashore that day

The BTB’s disembarkation figures are its own: “Disembarkation rates are 80 percent for passengers and 15 percent for crew members”, and “The tour purchasing rate for disembarked passengers is 60 percent, which compares favorably with the Caribbean average of 35 percent.” Neither figure carries a date on the BTB’s page.

The BTB names three ways to spend the day — a tour booked through the ship, a licensed operator in or near the Tourism Village, or exploring “independently within the time constraints of the tender schedule” — and says it operates an information desk in the main concourse of both cruise ports.

If you are trying to tell who is who at the terminal, the BTB publishes the uniforms: tourism police wear navy blue trousers or skirt with a light blue shirt and a black hat; standard police wear navy blue with a khaki shirt and a navy-blue hat. Taxis, it says, are “distinguished by their green license plates.” What that does and does not tell you about the city is covered on our is Belize safe page.

If your ship calls at Harvest Caye rather than Belize City, none of the above applies. The BTB says Harvest Caye “currently caters only for Norwegian Cruise Line passengers,” and Cave-Tubing.com puts it plainly from the operator side: “If you are on a ship that docks in Harvest Caye you are restricted to NCL excursions only… NCL is not allowing independent tour operators to pick up their guests from Harvest Caye.”

What the port and the lines don’t publish

These are gaps in other people’s published information. We looked and they are not there:

• Any tender timetable, frequency or boat capacity — from the Belize Tourism Board, the Belize Port Authority, the terminal or any line. The BTB’s advice is to ask your ship.
• Any per-ship arrival or departure time for a Belize City call. The BTB’s own schedule service carries every 2026 call as an all-day event with no clock times, and neither Carnival nor Royal Caribbean publishes Belize City port hours without a booking. The “six to eight hours” is the only published figure of any kind.
• Any regulated taxi tariff. Nothing on the Belize Tourism Board’s site, nothing on travelbelize.org, and the Department of Transport’s public portal is a motor-vehicle licensing system rather than a fare schedule. “Reasonably priced” is as specific as the destination gets.
• Any Carnival or Royal Caribbean shore-excursion price for Belize City. Royal Caribbean’s port page says so itself: “Sorry, there are no excursions for this port at this moment,” and “Full shore excursion details will be available once you book your cruise.”
• The number of tender docks or berths at Fort Street Tourism Village. The Port Authority lists the facility and publishes no capacity for it.
• Any opening date, or target year, for the Olo Caye piers.
• Goff’s Caye’s real carrying capacity. CZMAI’s own page says “a maximum carrying capacity of 150 visitors at any given time” in one paragraph and “the 100-150 daily visitors” in another; the Belize Tourism Board’s page on the same island said 150–200 when we read it on 6 September 2026 (it could not be loaded on 24 September 2026). Three figures, two of them on the manager’s own page.
• Whether the BZ$20 Goff’s Caye fee is inside the US$48 excursion price. The operator’s list does not itemise it.

What we did not check

Separate from the list above, because these are our limits and not the ports':

• Prices behind a cruise line’s booking wall. Every line page we read was read as a member of the public without a booked sailing. A signed-in passenger may see excursion prices we could not.
• Fares on any water-taxi route other than Belize City to San Pedro. We priced that one route in both directions and no other.
• Whether the 2026 calls dated on or after 24 September actually happen. Those 77 calls are a schedule.

How we researched this

Scope: this page reports source research, not an on-site test. We checked the schedules, ticketing systems, price lists and official sources named below on 6 September 2026 and re-checked them on 24 September 2026, when the three travelbelize.org attraction pages and the Government of Belize Press Office could not be loaded; calculations, unresolved disagreements and information we could not verify are labelled explicitly.

The call counts, monthly distribution, vessel list, capacity totals and ships-per-day figures are our own tabulation of the Belize Tourism Board’s cruise-schedule data service, the system behind its public Cruise App, pulled in full on 6 September 2026 and again on 24 September 2026 — 3,867 records covering 2017 to 2027, byte-identical on both dates — together with its own last-updated and active-years endpoints. The tender description, the six-to-eight-hour window, the disembarkation and tour-purchase rates, the taxi and police descriptions and the Harvest Caye restriction come from the BTB’s cruise page. The port facility listing comes from the Belize Port Authority’s register. Archaeological-site fees were read from the product-variation data embedded in the raw HTML of NICH’s own e-ticketing product pages, with the currency confirmed on NICH’s terms page. Goff’s Caye fees and dimensions come from CZMAI; zoo admission, hours and drive time from the zoo’s own visitor page; excursion prices and tour durations from three tour operators’ own published pages. We have not checked any of the three against a licence register, so they are described here as operators rather than as licensed operators, even though the BTB states that all tour guides and operators are required to hold a licence. The pier status comes from the developer’s own website and its two press announcements, and the government position from the Press Office statement, which is dated 2021. The San Pedro fares, fees and timetable are a live booking we ran on the operator’s engine on 24 September 2026 for 7 October 2026, repeating the one we ran on 6 September for 30 September. The DNS failures for the three Fort Street Tourism Village domain candidates were tested by us on 6 and 24 September 2026.

Where two sources disagree — the tender time, the Lamanai duration, the cave-tubing price, Goff’s Caye’s capacity, the developer’s job count, the BTB against its own data — we print both and do not average.

Figures on this page labelled our arithmetic are calculated by us from the sourced inputs cited below — sums, counts, distributions, elapsed times, and the all-aboard totals. Every other figure is reproduced as its named source published it.

Sources

• Belize Tourism Board — Cruise — the tender description and 15-minute crossing, the six-to-eight-hour window, the 333-calls figure, disembarkation and tour-purchase rates, the three ways ashore, taxis and police, the Harvest Caye restriction, the 2022 cruise-app line
• Belize Tourism Board Cruise App and its data service — full calendar, active years, last updated — every 2026 and 2025 call count, month table, vessel list, capacity total and ships-per-day figure
• Belize Port Authority — Belize Port Facilities — Fort Street Tourism Village’s listing and its location at the mouth of Halouver Creek
• Port of Belize Ltd — the cargo port’s published services, and the absence of any passenger service
• Government of Belize Press Office — Statement on Cruise Sector and Ports Development — dated 19 October 2021; the Stake Bank and Port of Belize positions of record (read 6 September 2026; the site did not respond on 24 September 2026)
• Olo Caye — the four-phase timeline with no dates on phases two to four, the dual piers, the $200M / 5,500 / ~700 figures, the 15-minute boat ride, the artistic-simulation disclaimer
• Olo Caye — Construction Begins at Mile 5, 2 September 2026 and Announcing Olo Caye, 10 April 2026 — the Phase 1 scope, the groundbreaking plan, and the 750-versus-700 permanent-jobs disagreement
• Royal Caribbean — Belize City — “Cruise ships anchor outside of Belize City harbor and guests tender in” and the absence of any published excursion
• Carnival — Belize shore excursions — checked for Belize excursion prices; none published
• NICH / Institute of Archaeology e-ticketing and its terms — Altun Ha, Lamanai and Nohoch Ch’een fees, the BZD currency statement, the licensed-guide and 40-inch cave rules, the ATM advance-purchase rule
• Coastal Zone Management Authority and Institute — Goff’s Caye — the 1-acre size, 12 nautical miles, BZ$20 / BZ$10 fees and two of the three capacity figures
• Belize Tourism Board — Goff’s Caye — the third capacity figure, 150–200 (read 6 September 2026; could not be loaded 24 September 2026)
• Belize Tourism Board — Altun Ha — 31 miles from Belize City (read 6 September 2026; could not be loaded 24 September 2026)
• Belize Tourism Board — Lamanai — the New River approach from Orange Walk (read 6 September 2026; could not be loaded 24 September 2026)
• The Belize Zoo — Plan Your Visit — admission, hours, last admission, the 30-minute drive, the one-to-two-hour visit
• Cave-Tubing.com — prices, tour details and FAQ — the price list, the 20-minute tender, the terminal 1 meeting point, the 4h / 4.5h / 5.5h durations, the Harvest Caye restriction
• Belize Cruise Excursions — the twelve-item cruise price list, the 1-hour drive to Tower Hill Bridge, the 2-hour ruins visit and the 5.5-to-6-hour Lamanai day
• UpClose Belize — Lamanai and Altun Ha & cave tubing — US$140 and US$155, the 8-to-9-hour Lamanai duration and the 9, 10-to-11 and 11-to-12-hour Altun Ha figures, the 60-minutes-west figure for Nohoch Che’en, the on-site rental costs
• San Pedro Belize Express — online ticketing — USD 34.00, the US$3.74 and US$1.50 checkout fees, 1h 30m and both timetables, priced 24 September 2026 for travel 7 October 2026; route list read from the booking form
• San Pedro Belize Express — San Pedro — the operator’s own “approx. 1 hour 30 minutes from Belize City”

Last verified: 24 September 2026. Cruise schedules, excursion prices, park fees and construction timelines change without notice.

Written by Estuardo Enriquez. This site is independent, carries no affiliate relationship with any operator, line or authority named here, and is not connected to any previous owner of this domain.