Sunset Dinner Cruises in Los Cabos: Four Very Different Evenings at Almost the Same Price

There are 28 sunset trips in our Los Cabos inventory, they start at €34.75, and the middle of the range sits at €94.82. Read the listings side by side and they blur into one another: sunset, open bar, El Arco, music, dinner. Book by price and you have a one-in-four chance of getting the evening you pictured.

They are not variations on a theme. They are four different products that happen to leave at the same hour.

The four kinds of boat

The pirate ship with a dinner show. Two hours, a BBQ dinner, unlimited drinks and a staged show. The sunset pirate ship cruise with dinner show costs €86.91 and holds 4.4 stars from 125 reviews. Worth knowing before you book: our inventory carries a second, near-identical listing – pirate ship sunset cruise and show with dinner, same €86.91, 4.5 stars from 58 people, same description almost word for word. If one is sold out for your date, check the other before you give up on the idea.

The party catamaran. The sunset party cruise with unlimited drinks is €73.27, the cheapest of the big-name evening boats, 4.4 stars from 129 reviews. Its own listing is refreshingly blunt about what it is: open bar, snacks, music, “from chill vibes to a wild party”. It also states adults 18 and over. That is not a detail buried in the small print – it decides whether your family can board at all.

The sailboat. Shared sunset sailing is the most-booked evening trip here, and the best-rated of those with more than fifty reviews, 4.9 stars from 138 reviews, at €92.18 for two hours. There is an open bar and there is no dinner. What you are paying for is the engine being switched off.

The one with an actual dinner. The sunset dinner cruise runs two and a half hours on a double-deck catamaran with a dance floor, serves a freshly prepared Mexican buffet, and costs €100.96, 4.5 stars from 52 reviews. It is the most expensive of the four and the only one where the food is the point rather than an accompaniment.

What “dinner” means on a boat here

It means a buffet. On the pirate ship it is a BBQ, on Cabo Escape (€86.91, 4.6 stars from 35 reviews) it is fajitas with chips, guacamole and salsa, on the dinner cruise it is Mexican dishes laid out on a double deck. Nobody brings a plate to your table.

If that is not the evening you want, the money is better spent in the other direction. A two-hour cruise with food and wine serves cheese platters and seasonal fruit with premium wines instead of a hot buffet – €100.46, 4.8 stars from 32 people – and the luxury yacht cruise with a chef’s dinner at €174.71 is the one listing here where dinner is cooked to order. It carries 4.2 stars from 31 reviews, the lowest rating in this group at by far the highest price, which is worth a moment’s thought rather than an assumption that dearer means better.

The departure time moves, and the sunset moves more

Cabo sits far enough south that the sun keeps unusually regular hours, but “regular” is not “fixed”. The earliest sunset of the year falls on 28 November at 5:35 p.m.; the latest is 3 July at 7:10 p.m.. That is a swing of about an hour and a half across the whole year, which is small by European standards and still enough to ruin a booking.

Operators handle it by moving the departure. The Pez Gato party cruise, for example, leaves at 5 p.m. in the winter season and 6 p.m. in summer, with boarding 15 minutes before. Two consequences follow:

• Check the departure time for your date, not the one in the listing photo caption. A 5 p.m. departure in December puts you back on the dock by seven in the evening. People routinely book dinner ashore for eight and then wonder why they have eaten twice.
• In late November and December, the sunset happens early in the trip. On a two-hour boat leaving at 5 p.m. with sunset at 5:35 p.m., the light show is over in the first half hour and the rest is a night cruise with a bar. That is fine if you know it. It is a disappointment if you assumed the sunset was the finale.

Why the boats all go the same way

Every one of these leaves the Cabo San Lucas marina and turns the same corner: past the sea lion colony, out to El Arco at Land’s End, then round into Pacific water. There is a geographic reason for the route rather than a scenic one – Land’s End is where the peninsula stops, and the sun goes down on the Pacific side of it.

It also means your sunset trip covers the same rocks as the daytime tours. If El Arco is the thing you came for, read El Arco and Playa del Amor first and decide whether you want to see it twice or spend one of those outings elsewhere.

The cheap option nobody mentions

If what you want is the light over the water and not an open bar, there is a one-hour sunset boat tour to the Arch and the sea lions at €34.75, 4.5 stars from 38 reviews. It is the cheapest sunset trip in the whole inventory and it is a third of the price of the dinner cruise, because it is exactly one hour and there is nothing to eat.

For a couple deciding between one long expensive evening and two short cheap ones, that is a real choice and the listings will never frame it for you.

Who should skip the sunset boat entirely

Three cases, stated plainly:

Anyone travelling with children under 18 cannot board the party cruise at all, and the pirate ship – a show with a BBQ, loud and cheerful – is the obvious substitute rather than the sailboat. Los Cabos with kids covers what else works in the evening.

Anyone who gets seasick. Evening wind is usually lighter than midday wind, which helps, but a catamaran rounding Land’s End in swell moves regardless of the hour. If the sea is a worry for someone in your group, the bigger double-deck boats are steadier than the sailboats. Anything beyond that belongs with a pharmacist before you travel, not with us.

Anyone here between mid-December and the end of April who has only one free evening. In those months the same water carries humpbacks, and a whale trip and a sunset cruise are two separate outings. The whale season has legal opening and closing dates; the sunset does not.

Booking without being surprised

Hotel pickup is included on some of these and not others – the Cabo Mar Mexican flavours cruise (€92.91, 4.6 stars from 32 reviews, two and a half hours) states pickup and drop-off explicitly, most of the others expect you at the marina. If you are staying out in the corridor or in San José del Cabo, that difference is a taxi in each direction and it can close the gap between two prices that looked far apart.

All 28 sunset trips, from €34.75, are on the sunset cruises in Los Cabos page.