Great Blue Hole: What the Dive Day, the Snorkel Seat and the Scenic Flight Really Cost

Verified on 24 September 2026, on three San Pedro dive operators’ own trip and rate pages, the Belize Audubon Society’s published park-fee sheet, both airlines’ Blue Hole tour pages, and both airlines’ own booking engines, searched for Sunday 27 September 2026.

The advertised price is not the price. At Belize Pro Dive Center, the Blue Hole dive day is advertised at US$285.00, and the operator’s own itemisation takes it to US$360.63 — US$285 base, plus 12.5% government tax (US$35.63), plus a US$40.00 marine park fee payable in cash. Gear rental, if you are not travelling with your own, adds US$33.75 a day. Belize Diving Adventures publishes a base of US$295.00 on the same structure, and Amigos del Mar a base of US$285.00, with the 12.5% tax listed as not included. Non-divers are not excluded: all three publish a Blue Hole snorkel price — US$215.00 at Belize Diving Adventures and at Amigos del Mar, from US$235.00 at Belize Pro Dive Center — each before the same US$40 fee and the tax.

The scenic flight is priced only inside the airlines’ booking engines, not on their tour pages. For Sunday 27 September 2026, from San Pedro, Tropic Air’s engine totalled USD 292.00 for one adult and Maya Island Air’s basket totalled US$235.00 for a window seat.

All three operators are San Pedro businesses on Ambergris Caye, and two of them — Belize Diving Adventures and Amigos del Mar — also publish prices for the far shorter day out to Hol Chan and Shark Ray Alley.

The dive day, priced

All three operators are based in San Pedro, all three add the identical US$40 park fee, and all three state the 12.5% tax. The base fare is the only real difference between them. Belize Pro Dive Center and Amigos del Mar publish the same US$285 base and so land on the same US$360.63 — Belize Pro Dive Center prints that total itself; for Amigos del Mar it is our arithmetic, because its page lists the tax as not included without adding it up. Against Belize Diving Adventures’ US$295, the US$10 gap in base fares becomes a US$11.25 gap at the till, our arithmetic. All three headline figures are before tax, so budget for it whichever operator you book.

What you get for it: three dives, not one

Belize Pro Dive Center publishes the day as three dives:

1. Great Blue Hole — approximately 130 ft / 40 m; the operator says the dive lasts around 25 to 30 minutes.
2. Half Moon Caye Wall — approximately 60 ft / 18 m.
3. Long Caye Aquarium — approximately 60 ft / 18 m.

Plus a visit to Half Moon Caye island. The Blue Hole itself is the short, deep one.

The day runs 5:30 AM check-in, 6:00 AM departure from the operator’s base at Alaia Resort beach in San Pedro, returning approximately 4:30 PM — about eleven hours door to door, with a boat ride of about 2.5 hours each way. The operator states a maximum of 6 divers per Divemaster, a boat capacity of up to 18, and a minimum of 10 guests to confirm a departure. Amigos del Mar publishes a longer day, 6:00 AM to 5:30 PM, with boat pick-up between 5:15 and 5:30 am.

Included: three guided dives and boat transport, tanks and weights, continental breakfast and a Belizean lunch, water, sodas, fruit and snacks, and the island visit. The two named exclusions are gear rental and the park fee.

Whether you are qualified to dive it

Belize Pro Dive Center publishes five prerequisites, and two of them are not settled by holding a certification card — the recency conditions:

• Minimum Open Water Diver certification, or qualifying equivalent — we priced what that course costs at six Belize shops.
• Advanced Open Water strongly recommended.
• A logged dive within the previous six months.
• Recent experience diving to at least 80 ft / 24 m.
• Minimum age 15.

Belize Diving Adventures states it more briefly — “You must be certified for diving to partake in any diving activities” — and adds a recommendation with a cost attached: “We highly recommend that divers that are to dive the Blue Hole must do at least 1 local dive first.” Its own 1-tank local dive is US$50.00, so taking that advice means one more dive and an extra US$50 before tax. Amigos del Mar requires “a recent logged dive within 6 months and at a minimum depth of 80ft”.

You do not have to dive

All three operators print a snorkeller price, and each one belongs beside that operator’s own diver price:

The gaps are our arithmetic. The US$40 park fee is the same for both seats, so it does not change them. Belize Pro Dive Center’s snorkel figure is a “from” price, so US$50 is the most that gap can be. Belize Pro Dive Center also lets divers who do not want the deep Blue Hole profile snorkel it instead and join the two reef dives, arranged with the shop before the trip.

The US$40 park fee, and what it is not

Three independent operators publish the identical total. Belize Diving Adventures lists “Park fees for: Hol Chan US$15.00 p/p; Blue Hole US$40.00 p/p”, Belize Pro Dive Center itemises “Marine Park Fee $40.00 USD cash”, and Amigos del Mar breaks it into its two halves — “Blue Hole: US $30” and “Half Moon Caye: US $10”.

That split is what makes the US$40 checkable, and it shows the figure is not one fee. The Belize Audubon Society, which manages both sites, publishes a park-entry fee sheet whose footer reads "(All prices in BZD)": Blue Hole Natural Monument BZ$60 and Half Moon Caye Natural Monument BZ$20, both in its non-resident column. At Belize’s fixed BZ$2 = US$1 peg that is exactly US$30 and US$10 — the operators’ own split, matched line for line against the managing body’s own published rate. The full sheet is reproduced on our what a Belize trip costs page.

So the US$40 is a primary-confirmed pair of fees for two different protected areas visited on the same day out, not a single Blue Hole charge. It is also cash, handed over on Half Moon Caye itself, so it is not inside anything you paid online.

That also settles the comparison with Hol Chan. Against the US$15 Hol Chan fee, the Blue Hole Natural Monument’s own BZ$60 / US$30 is twice it — not the two and two-thirds times the combined US$40 would suggest. The other US$10 buys a different island.

What the Blue Hole premium buys, in the same operator’s own prices

Belize Diving Adventures’ local barrier-reef dives, from the same rate card:

Fun-dive prices at other San Pedro shops are compared on our Ambergris Caye diving prices page.

Three local dives are US$120.00 before tax. Three dives on the Blue Hole day are US$295.00 before tax, plus the US$40.00 park fee. Both are subject to the same 12.5% tax. That is the whole comparison: the same number of dives, from the same shop, at very different prices — the difference being an eleven-hour boat day to an offshore atoll.

The scenic flight: priced in the booking engines, not on the tour pages

Neither airline’s Blue Hole tour page prints a price. Both airlines’ booking engines do, once you pick a date.

The two San Pedro figures are not measured at the same step. Tropic Air’s USD 292.00 is the engine’s own “Total to pay”, with the GST shown as a separate line. Maya Island Air’s US$235.00 is its shopping-basket total before the payment step, which we did not enter, so we cannot say whether anything is added there. Tropic Air’s calendar showed USD 259.89 for the same flight before its GST line — compare calendar fares with calendar fares, and totals with totals.

Maya Island Air publishes the route in detail: the barrier reef, Shark Ray Alley, Turneffe Atoll, an ocean freighter wreck, Lighthouse Reef, and two revolutions per port and starboard around the Blue Hole — so both sides of the aircraft get the view.

Tropic Air states, verbatim: “Blue Hole tours are weather dependent. Inclement weather conditions may necessitate a reschedule or in rare instances a cancellation and full refund.”

The morning-versus-afternoon split between the two airlines is a real choice, and it is one of the few things about the flight you can decide before searching a date.

Astrum Helicopters’ own homepage still carries no tour price: the only dollar figure on it is a US$10 million insurance policy.

A skydive onto the hole is sold as a separate package; its price, its seller and its terms are on our Great Blue Hole skydive page.

How big is it?

Tropic Air describes the Blue Hole as a 300-metre-wide limestone sinkhole. That figure is the operator’s, and it is the only dimension on this page: the width and depth figures quoted most often in travel writing could not be confirmed at any scientific or government source, so we have left them out rather than repeat them.

What the operators don’t publish

These are gaps in what the operators publish, not ours:

• A price on either airline’s Blue Hole tour page. Both pages print schedules; the fares appear only in each airline’s booking engine.
• A price from Astrum Helicopters, on its own site.
• Minimum passenger numbers for either airline’s scheduled Blue Hole flight, and whether a flight is cancelled below a threshold.
• A single government schedule for the whole US$40. The Belize Audubon Society’s sheet confirms both halves of it — BZ$60 for the Blue Hole Natural Monument and BZ$20 for Half Moon Caye — but none of the operator and Belize Audubon Society pages we read prints a combined government figure for the Blue Hole day, and we found no Fisheries Department page covering the marine leg.
• Verified depth and exact diameter of the Blue Hole from a scientific or government source.
• Whether the trip costs the same booked from Caye Caulker or Placencia. All three dive operators priced here are in San Pedro.

How we researched this

Scope: this page reports source research, not an on-site test. We checked the booking systems, timetables and official sources named below on the date shown; calculations, unresolved disagreements and information we could not verify are labelled explicitly.

On 24 September 2026 we re-read three dive operators’ own trip and rate pages, including the separate Blue Hole snorkel pages of Belize Pro Dive Center and Amigos del Mar, and transcribed the base fares, tax treatment, park fee, inclusions, exclusions, prerequisites, dive sites, depths, timings, sailing minimums and guide ratios from them. The park fee was checked against the Belize Audubon Society’s own published fee sheet, which is where the US$40 stops being an operator figure: the society prints BZ$60 for the Blue Hole Natural Monument and BZ$20 for Half Moon Caye, and states its own currency, so the operators’ US$30 + US$10 split can be matched to it at the fixed peg rather than taken on trust. The US$360.63 total for Belize Pro Dive Center is the operator’s own itemisation; every other all-in figure is our arithmetic on the operator’s published base, its stated 12.5% tax and the US$40 fee, and is labelled as ours. The scenic-flight schedules, durations, departure points, days and capacity come from Tropic Air’s and Maya Island Air’s own Blue Hole tour pages. The flight prices come from each airline’s own booking engine, searched on 24 September 2026 for one adult on Sunday 27 September 2026 (and, for Maya Island Air’s other seats and origins, Sunday 4 October 2026); we stopped before payment on both.

Where a number belongs to one named operator — each snorkel rate, for example — it is compared only against that operator’s own diver price.

Figures on this page labelled our arithmetic are calculated by us from the sourced inputs cited below — comparisons, percentages, multiples, differences, per-night and per-person conversions, running totals and currency conversions. Every other figure is reproduced as its named source published it. Where an operator or authority publishes a per-person or per-night rate directly, that is their figure and it is attributed to them at the point it appears.

Sources

• Belize Audubon Society — park entry fees — Blue Hole Natural Monument BZ$60, Half Moon Caye Natural Monument BZ$20, and the "(All prices in BZD)" footer that makes the currency proven rather than assumed.
• Amigos del Mar — Blue Hole dive — the US$285.00 trip price, the “Blue Hole: US $30” and “Half Moon Caye: US $10” fee split, the tax listed as not included, the 10-person sailing minimum, the 6:00 AM to 5:30 PM day and 5:15–5:30 am pick-up, and the recent-dive requirement.
• Amigos del Mar — Blue Hole snorkel — the US$215.00 snorkel price and its tax treatment.
• Belize Pro Dive Center — Blue Hole dive — the US$285 base, US$35.63 tax, US$40 cash park fee and US$360.63 total, US$33.75 gear rental, certification prerequisites, three-dive itinerary and depths, 5:30 AM check-in to ~4:30 PM return, the 2.5-hour boat ride, 6-divers-per-Divemaster ratio, 18-person boat capacity, 10-guest minimum, the snorkel-instead option, and inclusions.
• Belize Pro Dive Center — Blue Hole snorkeling — the “from 235.00 USD” snorkel price, with the US$40 fee and 12.5% tax listed as not included.
• Belize Diving Adventures — rates — the US$295 Blue Hole diver rate, US$215 Blue Hole snorkel rate, the US$40 and US$15 park fees, the 12.5% tax note, the certification and “one local dive first” statements, and the US$50 / US$85 / US$120 local dive rates.
• Tropic Air — The Great Blue Hole Tour — 1-hour duration, 1PM scheduled departure, departure points, window-seat and charter statements, the availability wording, the weather-dependency quote, and the 300-metre width description.
• Tropic Air booking engine — the USD 292.00 total and its fare, tax and GST lines, the USD 259.89 calendar fares, the days offered, and the fare rules.
• Maya Island Air — The Great Blue Hole Tour — 1-hour duration, 8:30/8:45/9:00 am departures, the Sunday/Monday/Wednesday/Friday operating days, 11-passenger capacity, the route description, the two revolutions per side, and the cancellation and change notices.
• Maya Island Air booking engine — the US$235.00 window-seat basket total and its net-fare and tax lines, and the co-pilot and other-origin “from” fares.
• Astrum Helicopters — read to establish that it publishes no tour price.

Last verified: 2026-09-24. Dive prices, park fees, flight fares and flight schedules change without notice. The Belize Audubon Society fee sheet carries no revision date of its own.

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.