Belize City to San Pedro Water Taxi: Schedules, Fares and What You Actually Pay

Re-checked live on 24 September 2026 on both water-taxi operators’ own booking systems, for travel on Wednesday 7 October 2026. Tropic Air’s booking engine answered our searches for this route with a CAPTCHA page that day, so the flight figures further down are from our 6 September 2026 search and are marked as such.

Two water-taxi companies run Belize City to San Pedro. San Pedro Belize Express: 8 sailings each way, USD 34.00, 1 hour 30 minutes. Caribbean Sprinter: 6 sailings each way, from US$35.50 to US$37.00 by departure, approximately 75 minutes. Both boats call at Caye Caulker on the way. The USD 34.00 is not what you pay: San Pedro Belize Express adds an Internet Processing Fee and a Port Authority Fee at checkout, and Caribbean Sprinter states its price already includes everything.

That fee structure — not the headline fares, which are within US$3.00 of each other — is what actually separates the two companies, and it gets wider with every extra passenger.

Departure times

Belize City → San Pedro

San Pedro → Belize City

Belize Express times and arrivals come from its live booking engine, and its departures match its printed schedule — an image served with a Last-Modified date of 22 July 2025 — departure for departure. Sprinter’s come from its booking engine, which prints an “Approx arrival” against each sailing.

Sprinter’s last boat out of Belize City (5:40 PM) is 10 minutes later than Belize Express’s (5:30 PM). Belize Express’s last boat off the island (4:30 PM) is 30 minutes later than Sprinter’s (4:00 PM). Both comparisons are our arithmetic on the two operators’ published times.

Sprinter’s sailings page states: “Our sailing schedule remains the same, seven days a week.” Belize Express publishes one schedule and says nothing about days of the week either way.

Fares, and the two fees on top

All priced on 24 September 2026 for one adult (plus one child where shown) travelling 7 October 2026, returning 11 October. Every figure in this table was identical when we first priced it on 6 September 2026 for 16 September travel.

San Pedro Belize Express’s child fare is USD 15.00, and it does not appear until after you have chosen a sailing. The operator’s FAQ names a “children’s rate” for ages 4 to 10 and never states the amount; the figure only shows on the passenger-information page, as “WEB: [Belize City - San Pedro] OW Child (4 to 10) — $15.00 US”. Under age 1 travels free as a “lapchild”. Anyone over 10 pays the adult fare. Groups over 12 people qualify for one free ticket.

The adult return ticket is genuinely discounted; the child one is not. USD 57.00 against USD 68.00 for two one-way adult tickets, and USD 30.00 against USD 30.00 for two one-way child tickets — both comparisons our arithmetic on the operator’s own USD 34.00 and USD 15.00. The Belize City to Caye Caulker adult return is USD 37.00 against USD 58.00 for two one-ways.

The fees San Pedro Belize Express adds at checkout

Neither fee appears next to the fare in the sailing list. Both appear once you pick a boat. These are the figures the checkout displayed in a web browser on 24 September 2026, for travel on 7 October:

The checkout displays an Internet Processing Fee of 11 per cent of the ticket subtotal, plus a Port Authority Fee of $1.50 per passenger per leg — $3.74 on $34.00, $14.96 on $136.00, in every one of the six bookings above; the percentage is our arithmetic on the displayed figures. The 11 is written into the fee’s row in the page’s code as incfees="11". That same code also carries larger fee figures, multiplied again by the number of passengers ($59.84 at four adults), which the page’s own script replaces with the 11 per cent figure before anything is shown. We stopped at this step and did not reach payment, so we have not confirmed which amount is finally charged. Nothing in the visible text of the site states the rate or what the fee pays for. Its FAQ confirms walk-in purchases exist and take most major credit cards; it says nothing about whether the internet fee applies at the counter, so we cannot tell you that buying in person avoids it.

Caribbean Sprinter states the opposite arrangement, verbatim on its booking page: “The pricing you see is the most you will pay, as discounts may apply for youth passesngers. There are no processing fees or charges, and pricing includes all applicable government fees & taxes.” [sic] Its results page repeats that rates are “the total trip cost per passenger, including all ancillary fees, charges and applicable government fees & taxes.” Note that each price is nonetheless displayed as a “From” figure — the operator calls the same number both a floor and a ceiling, and expanding a departure card reveals nothing but a “Select This Time” button.

What that adds up to

One-way Belize City to San Pedro, adults only, on the operators’ own displayed figures. Sprinter’s range is its cheapest and dearest departure that day; Belize Express’s total is fare plus both fees as displayed at the passenger step, which is the last screen we saw before payment:

That is our arithmetic, computed at every party size from one to four and against every Sprinter departure, not just the endpoints. The answer does not flip anywhere in that range: Sprinter is cheaper at every party size on every departure, and the margin widens each time you add a person. On a headline-fare comparison alone Belize Express looks US$1.50–3.00 cheaper, which is the reverse of what the checkout shows.

For one adult buying a return, the same comparison holds: Belize Express US$66.27 all in — again our arithmetic, USD 57.00 plus the $6.27 and $3.00 the engine showed — against Sprinter’s US$58.00–59.50 on its 08:00 outbound (US$57.00–60.00 across all six outbound sailings), which the operator says is everything.

The Caye Caulker stop

Both operators’ Belize City to San Pedro boats stop at Caye Caulker, and both engines show it in their own timings. On Belize Express, Belize City to Caye Caulker is 45 minutes, and all eight Caye Caulker arrival times — 8:45, 9:45, 11:15 AM, 12:45, 2:15, 3:45, 5:15, 6:15 PM — are also its eight Caye Caulker-to-San-Pedro departure times, 45 minutes on to the island. On Sprinter’s 08:00 boat, Belize City to Caye Caulker arrives 08:45, Caye Caulker to San Pedro departs 08:45 and arrives 09:15, and Belize City to San Pedro runs 08:00 to 09:15 — its published 0h 45m plus 0h 30m, and its 1h 15m through time. Its Belize City departures are listed “For all destinations”.

Buying it as two tickets costs more than buying it through, on both lines:

The two-ticket totals are our arithmetic on each operator’s own segment fares. If you want a night on Caye Caulker on the way, that is what the stopover costs. The full picture of that first leg — both operators’ Caye Caulker timetables and what the island end looks like — is on our Belize City to Caye Caulker ferry page.

One oddity on Sprinter: its 30-minute Caye Caulker to San Pedro hop is priced at a flat From US$32.00, which is dearer than its 45-minute Belize City to Caye Caulker leg on four of the six departures (US$31.50, US$30.50, US$31.00 and US$31.50) and level with it on the other two.

Luggage

Sprinter’s $200 figure is in its Contract of Carriage, not on its luggage page, and it is four times the other operator’s cap — our arithmetic on the two published figures. Its entire allowance is one sentence: luggage is “limited to what a person can practically carry or drag down a street by him or herself at one time.” Anything beyond that goes in the cargo hold on a barcoded tag tied to your itinerary ID, scanned on and off, and available within a few minutes of docking; round-trip passengers may leave the tag on for the return.

Belize Express colour-codes its tags by destination — Belize City yellow, San Pedro pink, Caye Caulker orange, plus blue and purple for Chetumal and Caye Chapel. On a boat that calls at Caye Caulker before San Pedro, that colour is what keeps your bag on board. Luggage left behind incurs a $5 BZD overnight storage fee. Cargo is capped at 150 lbs and must be checked in 30 minutes before departure.

Pets travel on Belize Express in a carrier or kennel: kennel rental is $10.00 USD Belize City to San Pedro, $7.50 USD on the two Caye Caulker legs, with a $2.50 USD discount if the pet brings its own. Pets must weigh under 90 lbs.

Terminals, and how early to turn up

San Pedro Belize Express departs the Belize Marine Terminal, #111 North Front Street, Belize City — the engine calls it simply “Main Terminal” — and docks at the “San Pedro Pier”. Phone 011-501-223-2225, [email protected]. The operator advises arriving “at the SPBE Belize City terminal at least 30-45 minutes early”, and its booking flow carries a blunter warning: “Time Management is important, San Pedro Belize Express Water Taxi Limited will not be held liable for clients running late … (The last vessel leaves at 5:30 pm sharp).”

Caribbean Sprinter does publish its terminal addresses — but not in the text of any page. They sit in the Google Maps info-window JavaScript in the source of its sailings page, which is why the page reads as address-less. Belize City is “10 N Front St.”, phone +501 223-0033, open 6:00AM – 6:30PM; San Pedro is “City Center, Front Beach, Between the Park & Pelican Street, at the Black Pearl (Fido’s) Dock”, phone +501 613-2032, with no hours published. San Pedro Belize Express’s Belize City terminal is #111 North Front Street and Sprinter’s is number 10 — the same street, different numbers. Sprinter does offer online check-in from 24 hours before sailing, using a five-character locator code plus the last four digits of a phone number.

Both operators sell an airport transfer separately, because neither terminal is at the international airport: Belize Express $25.00 US for the first person and $10.00 for each additional, Sprinter $15 USD per person. That leg is priced in full on our BZE airport to San Pedro page, which starts the journey at the airport rather than downtown.

Flying instead — and it depends which Belize City airport

Belize City has two airports, and Tropic Air charges very differently for them.

All priced live on 6 September 2026 for one adult on 16 September 2026, a date that has now passed. We tried to re-run these searches on 24 September 2026 and Tropic Air’s booking engine answered our search for this route with a CAPTCHA page, so none of the flight figures in this section has been re-confirmed since 6 September. Same airline, same island, two airports in the same city, USD 41.50 apart — our arithmetic on the engine’s two figures. The municipal airstrip showed USD 68.50 on every day from 13 to 19 September; the international airport showed USD 110.00 Monday to Friday and USD 33.88 on the Saturday and Sunday, with no fare class or condition displayed behind that weekend figure, so we cannot tell you what it is.

Against the boat, the downtown flight cost US$29.26 to US$33.00 more for one adult, and US$58.52 to US$66.00 more for two — our arithmetic, on the 6 September flight fare against the water-taxi all-in totals above, which were unchanged on 24 September. What it buys is time: 13 to 20 minutes in the air against 1 hour 15 minutes to 1 hour 30 minutes on the water, a saving of between 55 minutes and 1 hour 17 minutes depending on which boat and which flight, on the operators’ own published durations.

Maya Island Air also flies both routes and publishes no fare for either, or for any route. Its booking engine returned HTTP 403 to our requests on 6 September and again on 24 September 2026, so no Maya price could be checked at all — that is our route failing, not the airline declining to quote. What it does publish is a timetable, as pictures: from the municipal airstrip, to San Pedro at 07:30, 08:30, 09:30, 11:30 AM, 12:30, 01:30, 02:30, 04:30 and 05:30 PM, and back at 07:00, 08:00, 09:00, 11:00 AM, 12:00, 01:00, 02:00, 04:00 and 05:00 PM. From the international airport, to San Pedro at 10:40, 11:40 AM, 12:40, 01:40, 02:40, 03:40, 04:40 and 05:40 PM, plus seasonal 06:30 and 07:30 PM departures marked “RESTRICTED FOR PASSENGERS ARRIVING VIA INTERNATIONAL CARRIERS”.

Every one of those times comes off a graphic dated 8 February 2023. We requested all nine of the airline’s schedule images individually on 6 September and again on 24 September 2026, and each returned that same Last-Modified date both times. Nothing on the site is dated later and its footer still reads “Copyright 2022 by Maya Island Air”. Maya’s checked bag is 50 lbs against the water taxi’s identical 50 lbs, its carry-on is capped at 15 lbs, and excess baggage from the international airport to San Pedro is BZ$0.41 per pound. It asks for check-in 40 minutes before departure. What the island itself costs once you land is on our Ambergris Caye and San Pedro page.

If you are searching for “Ocean Ferry Belize”

The domain no longer answers at all. We requested https://www.oceanferrybelize.com/, http://www.oceanferrybelize.com/ and https://oceanferrybelize.com/ on 6 September and again on 24 September 2026, and each time all three timed out after about 21 seconds with no HTTP response, though DNS still resolves the name to 35.160.236.189. On 26 August 2026 the same domain served a page titled “Maint – Caribbean Sprinter – Back Soon” on an expired certificate; now it serves nothing. Ocean Ferry Belize is the retired brand of Caribbean Sprinter LTD, which books at sprinter.bz.

What the operators don’t publish

These are gaps in the operators’ own information. We looked and they are not there:

• Caribbean Sprinter’s San Pedro terminal hours. It publishes opening hours for its Belize City and Caye Caulker terminals and none for San Pedro.
• Any statement, in the visible text of San Pedro Belize Express’s site, of what the Internet Processing Fee is or how it is worked out. The checkout shows the amount; the 11 per cent rate appears only in the page’s code, and no note explains what the fee pays for.
• Caribbean Sprinter’s child or youth fare. Its booking page says discounts “may apply for youth passesngers” and names no age band and no amount; its search does not collect passenger ages.
• Any Sprinter duration for an individual sailing. Its booking engine prints an approximate arrival against every departure, but the only duration it publishes is one figure per route pair.
• Any Sprinter luggage weight or size limit.
• Any Maya Island Air fare, and any dated evidence that its 2023 timetables are currently flown.
• What Tropic Air’s USD 33.88 weekend fare is. The engine shows no fare class and no conditions behind it.
• What Tropic Air’s checked-bag weight limit is. It publishes dimensions and bag counts and no weight, and it publishes no fare-family table at all for routes that do not touch the international airport — which includes the municipal airstrip run used above.

What we did not check

Separate from the list above, because these are our limits and not the operators’: we ran every search as one adult except where a child or extra adults are named, we stopped each booking at the passenger-information step rather than paying, so a later step could add something we did not see, and we priced one travel date.

How we researched this

Scope: this page reports source research, not an on-site test. We checked the booking systems, timetables and operator pages named below on 6 September 2026 and re-checked all of them except Tropic Air’s booking engine on 24 September 2026; calculations, unresolved disagreements and information we could not verify are labelled explicitly.

We ran twelve separate searches through San Pedro Belize Express’s own ticketing system on 6 September 2026, priced for 16 September 2026 (returns 20 September), and ran the same twelve again on 24 September 2026, priced for 7 October 2026 (returns 11 October): both directions one way, both directions with a child, party sizes of one, two, three and four adults, three round trips, and the Belize City–Caye Caulker and Caye Caulker–San Pedro segments on their own. Every fare, ticket label, duration, arrival time and the last-vessel warning comes from what that system returned. The two fees are as the passenger step displayed them in a web browser, after the page’s own script had run; the page’s code before that script runs carries larger Internet Processing Fee figures, and we did not continue to payment to see which is charged. Caribbean Sprinter’s fares, arrival times and round-trip totals come from four one-way searches and one round trip on its own engine, run on both dates with identical results; its durations, operating-days statement and departure list from its sailings page, and its luggage, vessel and check-in rules from its On-Board, Check In and Contract of Carriage pages. Its three terminal addresses were read out of the map JavaScript in the source of its sailings page, which does not show them in its rendered text.

The Belize Express printed schedule’s 22 July 2025 date and Maya Island Air’s 8 February 2023 dates come from the HTTP metadata of the image files themselves, requested individually — all nine Maya files returned the same date. The luggage, tag, pet, cargo and liability rules come from Belize Express’s own Luggage, Cargo & Travel Information page, and the child, infant, group and shuttle rules from its FAQ. The flight fares and timetables come from three live searches on Tropic Air’s booking engine on 6 September 2026 (the engine served a CAPTCHA on 24 September) and from Maya’s published schedule graphics; Maya’s 403 comes from a live request to its booking host. The Ocean Ferry finding is three live fetches of the retired domain on each of the two dates.

All the party-size arithmetic is ours, computed at every size from one to four and against every Sprinter departure rather than at the endpoints, because a comparison that holds at the ends can fail in the middle. Here it does not fail — and we checked rather than assuming.

Figures on this page labelled our arithmetic are calculated by us from the sourced inputs cited below — totals, differences, percentages and comparisons. Every other figure is reproduced as its named source published it.

Sources

• San Pedro Belize Express — online ticketing — adult, child and round-trip fares, all sailings and arrival times, the 1h 30m duration, and the Caye Caulker segment fares
• San Pedro Belize Express — fare and passenger step — the ticket labels, the Internet Processing Fee and Port Authority Fee at every party size, the airport-transfer prices, and the “last vessel leaves at 5:30 pm sharp” warning
• San Pedro Belize Express — printed schedule — the eight departures each way, on the image at https://belizewatertaxi.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2025-SCHEDULE.jpg, last modified 22 July 2025
• San Pedro Belize Express — FAQ — the unpriced children’s category, the free under-1 lapchild, the group discount, the airport shuttle, the walk-in card acceptance, and the three crossing times that do not add up
• San Pedro Belize Express — Luggage, Cargo & Travel Information — the 23 kg / 50 lbs allowance, the 15-minute check-in, the tag colours, the $50 USD liability cap, the $5 BZD storage fee, the kennel rates and the 150 lb cargo limit
• San Pedro Belize Express — Belize City — the 30–45 minutes early advice and the terminal address
• Caribbean Sprinter — booking — every per-departure fare and arrival time, the round-trip totals, and the “no processing fees or charges” statement
• Caribbean Sprinter — sailings — the six departures each way, the published durations with their tolerance bands, the seven-days-a-week statement, and the three terminal addresses, phones and hours held in the page’s map JavaScript
• Caribbean Sprinter — On-Board — the luggage policy, the barcoded tags, the 60–110 passenger vessels and the on-board rules
• Caribbean Sprinter — Check In — the 24-hour online check-in and the locator-code requirement
• Caribbean Sprinter — Contract of Carriage — the $200 USD lost-baggage cap and its 48-hour condition
• Caribbean Sprinter — the $15 USD per person airport shuttle
• https://www.oceanferrybelize.com/ — three live fetches on 6 September 2026 and three more on 24 September 2026 (www over HTTPS, www over HTTP and the bare domain), all timed out with no HTTP response
• Tropic Air — booking engine — USD 68.50 from the municipal airstrip both ways, USD 110.00 from the international airport, every departure and arrival time, the CUK routings and the USD 33.88 weekend strip, all searched 6 September 2026; the engine served a CAPTCHA on 24 September 2026
• Tropic Air — Baggage Policy and Fares — the published dimensions and fare-family bag counts, the absence of any weight limit, and the statement that domestic itineraries excluding BZE publish no fare table
• Maya Island Air — flight schedule — both San Pedro timetables, read off the graphics at https://www.mayaislandair.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/0002-2.jpg (Belize City Municipal) and https://www.mayaislandair.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/0006-2.jpg (Philip Goldson International), plus the check-in and reservations panel at https://www.mayaislandair.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/0009-2.jpg; all nine graphics’ Last-Modified dates checked one by one on 6 and 24 September 2026
• Maya Island Air — Baggage — the 15 lb carry-on, the 50 lb checked bag and the BZ$0.41 per pound BZE–SPR excess rate
• https://booking.mayaislandair.com/ — requested live on 6 and 24 September 2026; returned HTTP 403 both times

Last verified: 24 September 2026, except Tropic Air’s fares and flight times, last read 6 September 2026. Fares, fees and timetables change without notice.

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