Whale watching tours worldwide: where to go, when, and what it costs

Whale watching tours are sold on every ocean and the brochures all look the same. What differs is the thing nobody prints: whether the whales are there in the month you are free, whether they are residents or passing through, and whether the boat travels two kilometers or eighty to find them. This site is an atlas built around those three questions.

Every place we cover has a pin on the map below, and every pin leads to the same page structure: which whales you can realistically meet and when, which boats sail, where they leave from, what a day costs, what the sighting guarantee really means, and what the local rules say about how close a boat may go.

• AkureyriYear-round, peak May–Sep
• AlaskaMay–Sep
• Argentina & PatagoniaJun–Dec
• AzoresYear-round, peak Apr–Oct
• CaliforniaYear-round
• CanadaMar–Nov
• Canary IslandsYear-round
• Cape Cod & New EnglandApr–Oct
• Costa RicaJul–Nov & Dec–Apr
• DalvíkYear-round, peak May–Sep
• Dana PointYear-round
• Dominican RepublicMid-Jan to end of Mar
• Ecuador & GalápagosLate Jun–Sep
• HauganesYear-round, peak Jun–Aug
• HawaiiNov–Apr
• HúsavíkMar–Nov, peak Jun–Aug
• IcelandApr–Oct
• JapanJan–Apr and May–Oct
• Long BeachYear-round
• MadeiraYear-round
• Mauritius & MadagascarJul–Nov, sperm whales year-round
• Mexico & BajaDec–Apr
• MontereyYear-round
• New South WalesMay–Nov
• New ZealandYear-round
• Newport BeachYear-round
• NorwayNov–Jan (Tromsø) · year-round (Andenes)
• Pacific NorthwestApr–Oct
• Québec CityMay–Oct
• QueenslandJun–Nov
• ReykjavíkYear-round, peak Apr–Oct
• San DiegoYear-round
• San FranciscoYear-round
• Santa BarbaraYear-round
• Santa CruzYear-round
• Scotland & IrelandMay–Oct
• South AfricaJun–Nov
• Sri LankaNov–Apr south, May–Oct east
• TadoussacMay–Oct
• VancouverApr–Oct
• Victoria & South AustraliaJun–Oct
• Victoria, BCMar–Nov, zodiacs year-round
• Western AustraliaMay–Dec

How to read this atlas

Work in this order and you will not waste a flight. Place first: pick the water, not the country. Whales second: a resident population beats a migration, because residents are there in every month and migrants are there for six weeks. Season third: check the month, not the season name, since a "summer season" can mean four good weeks either side of a peak. Boat fourth: the hull decides whether you enjoy the day. Price last, because the difference between a good trip and a bad one is rarely the fare.

The season wheel on every place page scores twelve months from off to peak. The field-guide cards scale each whale's silhouette to its real length. Numbers come from official sources — sanctuaries, fisheries agencies, marine parks and tourism boards — and are attributed on the page.

The world in six regions

North America has the longest coastline of reliable whale watching anywhere. Gray whales migrate the length of California between winter and spring; blue and humpback whales feed over the submarine canyon at Monterey in summer; humpbacks fill Stellwagen Bank off Cape Cod and the fjords of Alaska; orcas work the Salish Sea in the Pacific Northwest; and Hawaii turns into a humpback nursery in winter. Canada is a country of three separate whale coasts, and Mexico has the gray whale lagoons of Baja.

Europe splits into three rhythms. Summer only: Iceland from spring to autumn, and Scotland and Ireland from late spring. Winter only: Norway, where orcas and humpbacks follow the herring into the fjords near Tromsø in the polar night. Year-round: Madeira and the Canary Islands, where pilot whales and bottlenose dolphins hold resident populations within sight of the hotels, and the Azores, where more than 20 cetacean species have been recorded and the boats sail in every month.

Australia and Oceania is built on one enormous commute: humpbacks run up and down both Australian coasts between autumn and spring. Queensland has the calm, sheltered water of Hervey Bay where the whales linger on the way south; New South Wales watches them stream past Sydney; Victoria and South Australia get southern right whales close enough to watch from the sand; Western Australia has the longest season of the lot. New Zealand has the one place on earth where giant sperm whales are year-round residents a few kilometers from a small town.

Africa means South Africa first: southern right whales in Walker Bay at Hermanus, watched from a cliff path for free or from a permitted boat, with Plettenberg Bay and Gansbaai either side. Mauritius and Madagascar add sperm whales off Tamarin and a humpback breeding season off Île Sainte-Marie.

Asia is thinner but holds one genuine headline: blue whales, the largest animal that has ever lived, are seen from small boats off Sri Lanka — Mirissa on the south coast in the northern winter, Trincomalee on the east coast in the northern summer. Japan has humpbacks off Okinawa, orcas off Hokkaido and sperm whales in the Ogasawara Islands.

Latin America is where the two hemispheres overlap: Costa Rica gets humpbacks from the north and from the south in different halves of the year. Argentina has southern right whales in the bays of the Valdés Peninsula and orcas that hunt sea lions in the surf, the Dominican Republic the Samaná breeding grounds, and Ecuador the humpbacks off Puerto López.

Two hemispheres, six months apart

Most large whales do the same thing on opposite timetables: they feed in cold, productive water in their own hemisphere's summer, then swim to the tropics to breed in their own hemisphere's winter. That is why the two rings below are almost mirror images, and why there is no month in which the world is closed.

1. Northern hemisphere
2. Southern hemisphere

PeakGoodPossibleOff

Two feeding seasons, six months apart. Whales spend the warm months eating at high latitudes and the cold months breeding in the tropics, so somewhere in the world is always in peak season.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
Northern hemisphere	Possible	Possible	Possible	Good	Good	Peak	Peak	Peak	Peak	Good	Possible	Possible
Southern hemisphere	Possible	Possible	Possible	Possible	Good	Peak	Peak	Peak	Peak	Peak	Good	Possible

A northern winter is therefore not a write-off: it is peak season for breeding humpbacks in Hawaii, Baja California and Samaná, and orca season around Tromsø. The season calendar sets this out month by month.

How to read a sighting guarantee

No one can promise a wild animal. What operators sell under the word "guarantee" is a policy, and the policies differ more than the marketing does.

Most of them are a free re-ride: if the trip finds nothing, you sail again another day at no charge. That is worth a lot if you are in town for a week and nothing if you fly out tomorrow. A minority offer money back, and they say so precisely. Whale Watch Kaikōura, for example, answers "Am I guaranteed to see a whale? NO", publishes an "over a 90% success rate", and states that if your tour does not see a whale "we will refund 80% of your fare" — and it defines "whale" in its terms, which is the sort of detail that decides an argument on the dock.

Check three things before booking: what counts as a sighting, whether the remedy is a refund or another trip, and how long you have to use it. We quote the published clause on every place and operator review page rather than paraphrasing it.

Rules, distances and the boat you are standing on

Approach distances are law in most of the places we cover, and they are not the same law. NOAA Fisheries prohibits approaching within 500 yards of a North Atlantic right whale, and requires 100 yards from humpbacks in Hawaii. Fisheries and Oceans Canada requires 400 meters from endangered whales such as belugas in the Saguenay–St. Lawrence Marine Park, and an Interim Order keeps vessels 1,000 meters from Southern Resident killer whales in southern British Columbia.

A crew that keeps its distance and cuts the engine is not being lazy; that is the difference between a licensed operator and one that loses its permit. Each place page carries the local rule in an attributed box.

If you already know where you are and want what is within driving distance, the near-me finder sorts every pinned port by distance.

Why we compare one platform

We compare live prices from GetYourGuide only. One feed means one currency, one cancellation standard and one review base, so the numbers on a comparison table are genuinely comparable instead of being four platforms' marketing side by side. Where a place has no listing — the Baja lagoon camps, most of Western Australia — we say so and send you to the operator's own site instead. Our review of the platform itself is on GetYourGuide, and we review operators such as Elding in Reykjavík and Whale Watch Kaikoura separately.

English pages show US dollars; the German, Italian and Dutch versions show euros from the same feed on the same day. Reviews stay in English in every language, because that is where the wording of a guarantee matters most and translation blurs it.

Start with the ranking if you have not chosen a place, the season calendar if your dates are fixed, and the field guide if you came for one whale.