El Nido Island Hopping Tours

Tour A: The Big Lagoon, and Why You Paddle Into It

Tour A is the route the photographs come from. Four stops: the Big Lagoon, the Secret Lagoon, Shimizu Island and Seven Commandos Beach, all inside the sheltered northern half of Bacuit Bay, which is why it runs on days when Tour C cannot.

The Big Lagoon is a shallow channel of green water running back between vertical limestone walls, and your bangka does not go in. Engines are banned past the mouth. Boats tie up outside and you enter by kayak, which costs about ₱300 a kayak on top of a roughly ₱200 lagoon entrance, both cash, both collected on the spot. Paddling in takes fifteen minutes and the water under you shifts from jade to clear over white sand.

The Secret Lagoon is a different trick: a small pool behind a rock wall, reached through a crack barely wide enough for one person at a time. Expect a queue at the crack in high season, because everybody's boat arrives on the same schedule. Shimizu is the snorkelling and lunch stop, and Seven Commandos is a proper beach with a bar, which is where most Tour A boats end the day before the run back to town.

No listing on this page sells the plain Tour A as a shared bangka. The private speedboat covers the Big Lagoon as part of its combined A and C day, and every operator in town will sell you the joiner version on the beach for ₱1,200 to ₱1,500.

Tour B: Caves, a Sandbar and the Bay's Quietest Water

Tour B gets called the boring one, usually by people who booked it fourth. It works the eastern side of the bay: the Snake Island sandbar, which is a curving spit of sand that appears and disappears with the tide, then Cudugnon Cave, Cathedral Cave, Entalula Beach and Pinagbuyutan Island.

Cudugnon is the one you enter, ducking through a low gap into a chamber where archaeologists found burial jars. Cathedral Cave you see from the boat only, because the swell against its mouth makes landing a bad idea. Pinagbuyutan is the tall, isolated cone you have already photographed from the mainland without knowing its name.

What Tour B has that the others do not is space. The bay's crowd moves in a pack across A and C, and B sees a fraction of it. Our Tour B listing at $28.82 is six hours for 4.4 from 265 reviews, and it visits Popolkan and Snake Island on the same run. Full stop-by-stop breakdown in the Tour B guide.

Tour C: The Snorkelling Route, and the One the Weather Cancels

Tour C crosses the Tapiutan Strait to the western wall of the bay, and that crossing is the whole story of this route. It is open water. On a calm day it is twenty minutes of blue. During the southwest monsoon it is the first thing the harbour master closes, and Tour C is cancelled more often than the other three combined.

The payoff is the best snorkelling in Bacuit Bay. Helicopter Island, named for the profile it cuts against the sky, has coral gardens on both flanks. Hidden Beach sits behind a limestone screen you swim around. Secret Beach is a sand pocket inside a collapsed rock ring, reached through a submerged gap, and the crew will make you wear a life jacket for it. The Matinloc Shrine, a half-finished chapel from 1982 on a knife-edge headland, closes the day with a scramble to a viewpoint over the strait.

Lunch has moved. Boats used to eat at Star Beach; the standard stop is now Talisay. Both of our Tour C listings, $30.52 with 785 reviews and $28.13 with a buffet, run the same stops with different boats, compared side by side in the Tour C guide.

Tour D: Where the Small Lagoon Went

Every second guide online still lists the Small Lagoon under Tour A. That has been wrong since 27 November 2018, when the municipal council passed Ordinance No. 101, series of 2018, and moved it to Tour D on carrying-capacity grounds. Both lagoons on one boat, one morning, was more traffic than the water could take.

So Tour D now runs Small Lagoon, Cadlao Lagoon, Pasandigan Cove, Paradise Beach and Nat-nat, hugging Cadlao Island across the channel from town. It is the shortest boat day of the four and the least crowded, and it holds the stop that a lot of travellers rate above anything on Tour A. The Small Lagoon is a closed circular basin you reach through a slit in the cliff, kayak only, and inside it the walls cut the wind to nothing.

Plan on about ₱600 of kayak rental across the two lagoons here, plus the roughly ₱200 Small Lagoon entrance. None of the six listings on this page runs Tour D as a shared boat; book it through an operator office on Calle Real or add it to a private charter.

The Eco Fee Is a Ten-Day Pass, Not a Ticket

El Nido charges an Eco-Tourism Development Fee of ₱400 for anyone who is not a Palawan resident. Residents pay ₱200, children aged 6 to 13 pay ₱250, and under-6s go free. You pay it once, at the operator's office or to the guide before boarding, and the receipt is valid for ten days across every tour and site in the municipality.

That validity window is worth planning around. Book your four routes across a week and the fee costs you ₱400 total. Come back after a fortnight in Coron and you pay it again. The scheme dates to 2008 and funds the protected-area work in the bay, with the town budgeting around ten million pesos a year for it.

Keep the receipt somewhere dry. Crews check it at the beach, and a soaked, unreadable slip means paying twice.

The Fees the Listing Price Does Not Include

Dollar conversions use ₱61.06 to the dollar on 5 August 2026. Nothing on this list takes a card, and there is no signal at most stops even if a vendor wanted to try.

Bring small notes. A ₱1,000 bill at a kayak stand on Matinloc is a problem for everyone involved, and the collectors rarely carry change. Budget around ₱1,500 in cash for a Tour A day and ₱800 for a Tour B or C day, and you will not be short.

Booking Online Against Booking on the Beach

Walk into any office on Calle Real or Rizal Street and the joiner rates are standardised: ₱1,200 to ₱1,800 depending on the route, sometimes less at the end of a slow day. Booking online costs a little more. Our cheapest listing, Tour C with buffet lunch at $28.13, works out to about ₱1,717.

What the difference buys is a confirmed seat and free cancellation up to 24 hours out, which matters in two situations. High season, from December to April, when the good boats are full two or three days ahead. And the monsoon months, when you want the option to walk away from a Tour C the night before the strait closes.

Private charters are the other split. A whole bangka runs about ₱6,000 to ₱11,600 depending on the operator, which beats six joiner tickets and lets you leave at 07:30 to reach the Big Lagoon before the fleet. The private speedboat covering Tour A and C at $81.84 does the same thing faster, and it is the only listing here that puts two routes into one day. What chartering buys, and when it does not pay, is in the private boat guide.

Carrying Capacity Rewrote the Itineraries

Bacuit Bay sits inside the El Nido-Taytay Managed Resource Protected Area, and the pressure on its lagoons has been a municipal problem for a decade. The response has been a series of ordinances that changed what a tour can do, and travel guides have been slow to follow them.

The biggest was Ordinance No. 101, series of 2018, passed in a special council session on 27 November 2018, which amended the 2013 tour regulations and pulled the Small Lagoon out of Tour A. Officials were explicit about the reason: too many boats and swimmers arriving at both lagoons on the same morning. The Small Lagoon moved to Tour D alongside Cadlao Lagoon, Pasandigan Cove, Paradise Beach and Nat-nat.

Motor restrictions followed the same logic. Engines are not allowed inside the Big Lagoon, so bangkas moor at the mouth and guests kayak or paddleboard the last stretch. It is the reason the Big Lagoon is quiet, and the reason your ₱300 kayak is compulsory rather than a nice extra.

The Seven Circuits That Lasted One Season

In October 2020 the tourism office scrapped A, B, C and D altogether and replaced them with seven half-day circuits marketed as the 7 Wonders of El Nido: three premium routes and four regular ones, three stops each, about four hours apiece. Small Lagoon Premium and Matinloc Island Premium were priced at ₱1,400, Big Lagoon Premium at ₱1,200.

The logic was to spread arrivals across more departure slots. The reality was that a bay running at pandemic traffic did not need it, and operators, guides and every booking platform in the country were built around four letters. The town reverted, and A, B, C and D are what every office sells today.

It is worth knowing the circuits existed, because a handful of operators still quote a premium half-day Big Lagoon or Small Lagoon product using those names. Those are real, and they are shorter and more expensive per stop than the joiner tour.

What to Bring, and What Not to Wear

Leave the single-use plastic bottles behind. The town has banned them across the protected area and crews will ask you to decant into a reusable one before boarding.

One more thing worth doing on the first morning: check which boat you are on before you pay for the day. If the crew is loading 25 people onto a bangka and you booked expecting a small group, that is the moment to say so, not at the first stop.

• Cash in ₱100 and ₱500 notes, roughly ₱1,500 for a Tour A day and ₱800 for B, C or D
• Reef-safe sunscreen, and a rash guard, which does the job better and does not wash into the coral
• A dry bag: bangkas take spray over the bow and there is nowhere covered to stow anything
• Your own mask if you snorkel often, because the ones on board leak more often than not
• Water shoes for the rock scrambles at the Matinloc Shrine and the entry to Secret Beach
• The eco fee receipt, in a ziplock, for every subsequent tour inside the ten days