The three days, and how long each one takes
Every boat day we run from the Belek hotel belt is a full day, and there is no shorter version of any of them. What differs is where the time goes: the galleon spends most of it on salt water, the Green Canyon day spends a real part of it on the road inland, and the Manavgat day splits itself between a market on foot and a river under a wooden hull.
The figures below are the ones our own record holds, and they are the whole day rather than the boat. What a holiday actually loses to one of these trips is measured from your hotel lobby, not from the gangway, which is why the two kinds of figure are labelled differently and why one of them is bigger.
If that was the whole of your question, you already have the answer and the rest of this page is only the explanation of it.
- Alibaba pirate galleon — about 6-7 hours on the water, inside a full day out
- Green Canyon reservoir cruise — roughly 8 hours door to door, the longest of the three
- Manavgat market and river day — 7 hours, and only on a Monday or a Thursday
- All three are morning collections with an afternoon return
- All three include the round-trip hotel transfer inside the fare
- None of the three has a half-day, evening or shortened version
Why the door-to-door figure is always the longer one
Two clocks run on a day like this and only one of them belongs to the boat. The boat's clock starts when the lines come off at Side Harbour and stops when they go back on. Yours starts in the hotel lobby, some time before that, and stops when the same vehicle drops you back at the same lobby in the afternoon. Every figure on this page that says on the water is measured on the boat's clock; every figure that says door to door is measured on yours.
What sits in the gap is not wasted time so much as the shape of the operation. The vehicle runs a round through the hotels of the belt, so you share the road with the guests collected before and after you. Belek has no boat harbour of its own, so the galleon day carries a road leg to Side Harbour in each direction. And getting a full complement of guests on and off a boat is not instant at either end.
We are not going to turn that gap into a number. Our record holds no drive time and no distance for any of the three days, and a figure invented to make this page tidier is exactly the figure a guest would quote back to a driver on a morning it did not hold. The instruction that is actually safe is duller and more useful: treat any of the three as the whole day.
The galleon day: two figures that nearly meet
Our record puts two numbers on the pirate boat and they sit almost on top of each other. The boat portion is described as about six to seven hours on the water, and the tour's own recorded duration is seven hours. Read that as a range rather than as a stopwatch, because that is what it is.
Our record does something slightly awkward with those two numbers, and it is worth naming rather than smoothing over: it puts the boat at about six to seven hours and the tour as a whole at around seven, which is two measurements of different things landing on almost the same figure. Read that as a sign the numbers are approximate rather than a stopwatch reading. The morning round and the road to Side Harbour run on your clock and not the boat's, so the day is not the shorter of the two figures however the arithmetic is written down. Nobody is short-changed by that — €25 per adult and €12.50 per child aged 4 to 11 buys the whole of it, transfer included, and infants aged 0 to 3 travel free — but a guest who planned to the hour rather than to the day has been let down by a web page, not by a crew.
The shape itself does not vary: collected in the morning, driven to Side Harbour, out along the Side coastline with swimming breaks, the barbecue lunch and the foam party in between, then back into port and back to the hotel in the afternoon. What actually happens in that order is a different page's job. This one only tells you what the day costs you in hours.
Green Canyon is the longest of the three, and the road is inside the figure
The Green Canyon cruise is roughly eight hours door to door, which makes it the longest day we sell from Belek, and the reason is geography rather than more time afloat. The water is not the Mediterranean at all. It is a freshwater reservoir held behind the Oymapınar Dam near Manavgat — a deep-green, cool lake between pine-clad cliffs — reached by an inland drive in an air-conditioned vehicle, with the same driver bringing you back.
That drive is counted inside the eight hours at each end rather than added on top of them. In fairness it is also part of what people book the day for, because the road inland is the scenic half of a scenic day rather than an interruption to it. It is still time out of your holiday, though, and it is what separates this day from the other two.
So if cool, calm water is what you are after, the extra hours are the price of it, and the fare is €42 per adult and €25 per child aged 4 to 11. If your week is tight, this is the day to move rather than the day to squeeze.
The Manavgat market and river day: seven hours, on one of two dates
The market and river day runs seven hours, so it is not the longest of the three, but it has by far the tightest calendar. The market runs on Mondays and Thursdays, and those are the only two days this trip departs. Two constraints therefore stack on it: it has to be a full day you can spare, and that day has to be a Monday or a Thursday.
The seven hours cover both halves of it. There is time on foot at the big open-air market in Manavgat — spices, fresh fruit and vegetables, Turkish cotton and textiles, leather, jewellery and souvenirs — and then a calm cruise on the Manavgat River aboard a traditional wooden riverboat, with a riverside lunch and a licensed English-speaking guide for the whole day. It is not a swimming trip and it is not a sea trip.
One thing worth weighing before you plan a week around it: a market on foot is a slower seven hours than a deck. If someone in your party tires easily, the length of this day is felt in the legs rather than on the clock.
Where your hotel sits in the morning round moves both ends of your day
The one figure we genuinely cannot publish is the one people most want, which is what time you are collected. There is no fixed pickup time on any of these days. The vehicle runs a route, that route takes in Belek, Kadriye, Boğazkent and Serik as a matter of routine, and where your hotel falls along it decides when your door opens. You are told the day before the tour, once the round has been built.
That is also why the door-to-door number is a range rather than a fact. A hotel collected early in the round is out of the door sooner than one collected last, and the order can run differently on the way home. What does not move is the boat: the same hours on the water, the same crew, the same lunch and the same fare, whichever end of the round you happen to sit on.
If your hotel sits well beyond that stretch of coast, message us with the name before you book and you will get an honest answer about whether the driver can reach you, rather than a promise that collapses at dawn.
There is no half-day boat trip from Belek
This is where an honest page has to disappoint somebody. We do not run a half-day boat trip from Belek and we do not run a shortened version of any of the three. There is no morning-only galleon, no couple of hours along the coast and nothing that has you back at the hotel for lunch.
Nor is there an evening or sunset cruise from Belek, a private boat or yacht charter you could take out for as long as you liked, a fishing boat, a diving boat, or a Suluada departure. We do sell Suluada — from Side and from Antalya, not from here. Writing that down costs us a booking now and again, and it costs a great deal less than a guest turning up for a day we never sold.
So if what you actually have free is half a day, none of these three will fit into it, and the useful thing we can tell you is that a boat day from Belek is a whole-day decision. There is a half-day shape of day on this coast — an off-road morning rather than a day at sea — and our comparison page sets the two against each other honestly, including the half we do not operate ourselves.
Planning around a full day
Because all three are full days, the real planning question is where one goes in the week rather than how to fit one into an afternoon. Two dates are worth protecting. Your arrival day is usually taken already by the airport transfer and the check-in, and your departure day pairs badly with a boat that comes back in the afternoon. The day before you fly is worth a second thought as well.
Everything else about the booking is forgiving, which takes most of the pressure off the guess. Nothing is prepaid and no card is taken online, you pay in euros on the tour day, and cancellation is free up to 24 hours before departure, so holding a date early and releasing it later costs you nothing. The one hard edge is at the front of the calendar: same-day reservations are not accepted, so the earliest date you will be offered is tomorrow.
And the numbers on this page are the honest ones rather than the flattering ones. We would rather you booked a day you had room for than squeezed one into an afternoon that was never long enough for it.
- Pirate galleon: about 6-7 hours on the water, €25 adult and €12.50 child aged 4-11, infants 0-3 free
- Green Canyon: roughly 8 hours door to door, €42 adult and €25 child aged 4-11
- Manavgat market and river: 7 hours, €43 adult and €30 child aged 4-11, Mondays and Thursdays only
- All three: morning collection, afternoon return, round-trip hotel transfer inside the fare
- No pickup time is published anywhere on this site; it is confirmed the day before the tour
- No prepayment and no card online: you pay in euros on the day, and cancel free up to 24 hours before departure
- Earliest bookable date is tomorrow; same-day reservations are not accepted