San Ignacio and Cayo: Every Tour Price and Site Fee, Checked Live

Verified on 26 August 2026, on one San Ignacio operator’s full published rate card, a second operator’s tour pages, and the Government of Belize’s own National Institute of Culture and History (NICH) ticketing system.

Guided days out of San Ignacio run from US$65 per person (Cahal Pech) to US$525 (an overnight at Tikal) on Pacz Tours’ published rate card, read on 26 August 2026. The Actun Tunichil Muknal cave tour — the ATM cave — is US$145 per person, and a second San Ignacio operator, MayaWalk, publishes the identical figure. Xunantunich’s own entrance fee is BZ$25.00 — US$12.50 for a non-resident adult on the government’s ticketing system.

In Cayo the guiding, not the ruin, is what costs: a US$12.50 entrance fee sits inside a US$95 guided half-day.

Pacz Tours’ shared rate card, per person

All figures are Pacz Tours’ own, per person, in US dollars, on a shared or group basis, read on 26 August 2026. The card prints 19 lines but sells 18 distinct shared products: it lists the cave tubing and zip line pairing twice, once in each order, at the same US$155.

The cheapest guided product on the card is Cahal Pech at US$65, and Cahal Pech is walkable from San Ignacio town. The most expensive single day is Lamanai at US$225; the most expensive item of any kind is the Tikal overnight at US$525.

The same operator’s private rates

That is 13 private tours against the 18 shared ones above — the private list is the shorter card, and eleven tours appear on both.

What going private actually adds, tour by tour

There is no single percentage. Across the eleven tours Pacz prices both ways, our arithmetic on its own card gives:

The premium is 8% at one end of the card and 61% at the other. Pacz’s private list carries no ATM cave line at all; MayaWalk does, at US$250 private against its US$145 group rate.

What combining two sites saves

Also our arithmetic, from the same card:

The ATM cave

US$145 per person, from both operators we checked. Pacz Tours and MayaWalk Tours publish the same number, on pages read the same day.

Both operators include hotel, resort or Airbnb pickup in or near San Ignacio. The route involves multiple river crossings; the water is chest-high at the cave entrance and ankle- to waist-deep inside. The camera ban is stated as protecting cultural heritage.

You cannot buy your own ticket. The government’s ticketing site states it outright: “Tickets to Actun Tunichil Muknal Cave are sold by licensed tour operators only!” The gate fee itself — BZ$60.00 for a non-resident, US$30 at the fixed peg — was read from NICH’s own ticket store on 26 August 2026 by our ATM cave fee, hours and site rules page, not here, and every operator we priced bundles it into the tour price rather than charging it at the cave.

Xunantunich

The crossing closes an hour before the site does. The site is open until 5:00 pm on NICH’s own page; the hand-cranked ferry that carries visitors across the Mopan River runs 7:30 AM to 4:00 PM according to Pacz Tours. NICH confirms the ferry exists, is hand-cranked, and that on arrival all passengers must exit their vehicles and horseback riders must dismount — but it publishes no ferry hours at all, which is why the 7:30–4:00 window is attributed to the tour operator rather than the government.

NICH locates the site “near the village of San Jose Succotz in the Cayo District” without publishing a distance; the 8 miles is Pacz’s figure.

Every fee variation NICH sells for the site, both last-entry cutoffs and where BZ$25 sits among Belize’s Maya sites are on our Xunantunich entrance fee and hours page. Pacz’s US$95 Xunantunich tour is a half day with pickup from hotels, resorts and Airbnbs, and that tour’s price is stated to include the guide, transportation, entrance fees and taxes. Booking requires a few hours’ advance notice.

Every NICH price on this page is in Belize dollars

Read the government’s ticketing pages and you will see a bare "$25.00" with no currency beside it. Its product page on the main NICH site shows the same uncoded band, “Residents $10.00, Non-Residents $10.00 – $25.00”. Neither page states which dollar that is.

It is BZ$25.00 — US$12.50. The ticket store behind those pages publishes the currency even though the pages themselves do not: NICH’s own store endpoint returns "currency_code": "BZD" for every product it sells, on both nichbelize.org and ticketing.nichbelize.org, with Xunantunich’s top price recorded as 2500 minor units — BZ$25.00. Belize pegs its dollar to the US dollar at a fixed 2:1, so every fee below halves cleanly.

That resolves the whole table. There is no ambiguity left to warn you about; there is just a currency the government’s storefront omits from the page and states in its data.

What the other archaeological sites charge

All in Belize dollars, with the US equivalent at the fixed 2:1 peg. The bands span resident and non-resident tickets and the age categories NICH sells — Minor (under 12), Minor, Minor (under 5), Adult, and Belizean Golden Citizen (65+).

The most expensive archaeological site ticket in the country is US$12.50, and three sites are at it — Caracol, Xunantunich and Lamanai.

How the days fit together

Xunantunich is a half day, starting 9:00 AM or 1:00 PM. The ATM cave takes the whole of one, and the three published descriptions of its length do not line up. Pacz Tours says both things about its own tour: it calls the day “about 8 hours, full day”, and it separately publishes departure between 8:00 and 8:30 AM and a return between 3:00 and 3:30 PM, which is a seven to seven-and-a-half-hour window. MayaWalk calls its tour 8–9 hours. We print all three rather than reconciling them — the clock times are Pacz’s, the 8-hour summary is Pacz’s, and the 8–9 hours is MayaWalk’s, and none of them is a measurement of another company’s day. Either way nothing else fits that day. Tikal is sold both as a day tour (US$155 shared) and an overnight (US$525).

The combination prices show which pairs the operator itself puts in one day: Cahal Pech + Xunantunich at US$150, Xunantunich + Barton Creek at US$165, Cave Tubing + Xunantunich at US$175.

What the operators and the government don’t publish

• How far the ATM cave is from San Ignacio, other than one operator’s approximately 1.5 hours. Pacz publishes no drive time.
• The distance to Caracol and the state of that road — the longest day trip on the card, at US$130 shared or US$175 private.
• Cahal Pech’s opening hours. NICH publishes the ticket band and not the hours.
• Whether the Mopan River ferry charges anything, and whether it runs on public holidays.
• A private ATM cave rate from Pacz Tours — its private list has no ATM line.

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.

We read Pacz Tours’ complete published rate card and its ATM cave and Xunantunich tour pages on 26 August 2026, MayaWalk Tours’ ATM cave page the same day, and NICH’s own site and ticketing system. Tour prices are per person as each operator states them.

NICH’s visible pages show a bare $, so we queried the ticket store that serves them. Its product endpoint returns "currency_code": "BZD" on both NICH domains, along with each site’s price in minor units — which is how the Belize-dollar figures above are stated as Belize dollars rather than inferred. The US column is the fixed 2:1 peg applied to it, and nothing more.

The private-premium and combination-saving tables are our arithmetic on Pacz’s published card, computed for every tour it prices both ways rather than for a selected few.

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

• Pacz Tours — tour rates — every shared and private price, and the combination prices
• Pacz Tours — Actun Tunichil Muknal — US$145, 8:00–8:30 AM departure, 3:00–3:30 PM return, 6 guests per guide, 40-inch minimum, camera ban
• MayaWalk Tours — ATM cave — the matching US$145 group rate, US$250 private, 8–9 hours, 1.5-hour drive, water depths
• Pacz Tours — Xunantunich — 8 miles west, ferry hours 7:30 AM–4:00 PM, US$95, 9:00 AM and 1:00 PM departures, what that tour’s price includes
• NICH — Xunantunich — 8:00 am–5:00 pm daily including holidays, the $10.00–$25.00 band, the hand-cranked ferry and the dismount rule
• NICH ticketing — Xunantunich — the non-resident adult price as the ticketing system displays it, and El Castillo at 130 feet
• NICH ticketing — site index — every site fee band, the ticket and age categories, and the licensed-operators-only rule for ATM
• NICH ticket store — product data — "currency_code": "BZD", and Xunantunich’s BZ$25.00 top price, from the store that serves the pages above
• Belize Travel Insider — Xunantunich — an independent reading that matches: BZ$25 non-resident, BZ$10 resident

Last verified: 26 August 2026. Tour prices and site fees change without notice.

• BELTRAIDE (Government of Belize statutory body) — Belize General Sales Tax and hotel accommodation tax that apply to a Cayo stay. Read 2026-08-26.

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.