My wife and I will be in Istambul in October and are hoping to take a boat tour on the Bosphorus. Would like sightseeing tours lasting a couple of hours or so during the daytime. We started to do research and find many tours advertised supposedly with high ratings and it is hard to separate the good and bad. Can someone recommend daytime boat tour(s) that they can recommend to us? Thanks!
Posted by
Sioux Falls, SD, USA
3101 posts
If you have the RS book, he suggests taking the normal ferry from Istanbul to the Black sea. It was a full-day event, with 3hr cruise out and back, and a stop in a village at the end. We got the cornbread with anchovies, and also had lunch. We look back on this trip with great fondness. I think the ferry was maybe 8 TL/person.
Posted by
Atlanta, GA
783 posts
I did a private cruise as part of an organized tour on one visit, and we did a Turyol (private ferry) cruise on another visit. Honestly, the Turyol cruise was just as good as the private cruise for a tiny fraction of the price. The private cruises run around $100 (?), and Turyol was around $5, maybe a tad more. Both of them went up to the second bridge (Dolmabahce Palace, Ortakoy Mosque and Rumeli Fortress) and back.
We considered the public ferry for roughly the same price as Turyol, but it didn't run as frequently and didn't fit our schedule.
A Bosporus cruise, how ever you decide to do it, is a must-do in Istanbul. It's one thing to read about how crowded and strategically significant the Bosporus is. It's another thing to experience it.
Posted by
OP
100 posts
Thanks very much for these. Also somehow I didn’t realize that RS had a Turkey travel book so I just downloaded it on my Kindle. Thanks again.