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Hydrofoils from Sorrento to Capri - Refund if Cancelled?

Hello,

My husband and I will be travelling to Capri from Sorrento during the 3rd week of May. Ideally, I'd like to travel by hydrofoil which is much faster than the regular ferry. I sent an email to the Sorrento hotel I will be staying at asking whether they would recommend buying the tickets in advance. They replied that they don't recommend it as the hydrofoils may be cancelled if the sea is too rough. I have a few questions:
1. I believe that tourism to Capri starts to get busy in May. Will we have a problem if we don't book the hydrofoil tickets in advance? We want to take a boat first thing in the morning.
2. Are hydrofoil trips frequently cancelled during the month of May? Does anyone know?
3. If we do go ahead and book the tickets ahead of time, if the hydrofoil is indeed cancelled on the day we have booked, is it possible to get a refund?

Thanks for any advice you can give me.

Posted by
23653 posts
  1. Our experience with hydrofoil in July is that they have a lot of capacity so assume probability of being full as low.

  2. Don't about how frequent, but weather can be problem both ways.

  3. I would assume so but check refund policy with the company. No one here knows what the company's refund policy.

Posted by
1005 posts

Been to A.C. 4x now always staying in Sorrento--2x in mid-July and 2x in mid-October. We have never purchased our boat tickets to Capri, Positano or Amalfi town in advance and never had a problem getting tickets.

Posted by
8037 posts

It may be helpful to establish a few things that seem doubtful to me. (We took a huge, passenger only ferry with hundreds of airline style seats from Capri back to Sorrento a year ago, in the last week of May. It was so full that we had to sit on the floor in the (very slightly) open-air but completely covered rear deck to be with our friends. But it was not a hydrofoil.)

Questions:
1)Do hydrofoils exist on the Sorrento-Capri run, as well as on the Naples-Capri run, which is a much longer distance?
2)Does the travel time from Sorrento-Capri make the mode of boat power very important?
3)Does the OP wish to subordinate choice of departure and return times to speed of the ride?
4)Is advance purchase a)Really important to the OP b)Necessary at the end of May?
5)Don't regular boats occasionally get cancelled for really rough water?

I would note that a quick online look reveals a lot of predatory efforts to pre-book ferries, with vague terms like "High-Speed Ferry", which is a transparent effort to blur Hydrofoils with other types of boat. We walked to the Sorrento marina and found several different companies offering ferries to Capri. Of course, one company will not volunteer that you could leave forty minutes sooner by going around the corner to the window for their competitor. I also felt that we were given pressure to buy our return trip for a specific time, when we bought our outbound ticket.

Now, during a busy time (which is every time the sun shines, in Capri .. ) there is some value to knowing that you have a seat home in the afternoon. Who wants to risk having to wait an hour, or pay a (possible) premium (like a last minute airline seat) to get home for dinner? Despite having a ticket, it was annoying to find that our return ferry (same company, both tickets bought at the same time at the same window in Sorrento) left from a slip 1/4 mile from where our arriving ferry had dropped us off. We should have looked for some sort of display showing what slip the boat would be at, instead of assuming that the same company uses the same slip all the time. I think one reason for this was that our ferry home carried at least eight times as many people as our ferry TO Capri.

BTW, we skipped the Blue Grotto, and were glad we did. There was a more than we could see on a daytrip visit, without spending hours on the Blue Grotto. We also thought taking a cab to get our travel started was a good value, after we saw how crowded the microscopic municipal busses were, and how long the lines and trip intervals were.