Miami helicopter tour: every flight, compared

Eight of the eleven flights on this page use a helicopter: the short pad flights out of Miami, the sunset flight, the champagne flight for two, and the two flights that lift off outside the city, in Fort Lauderdale and Pembroke Pines. The other three are small planes — fixed-wing aircraft that leave from a runway rather than a helipad, cost less per minute, and generally spend longer in the air for the price. A Miami helicopter tour and a Miami plane tour end up showing much of the same skyline; the difference is the aircraft under you and what it costs to hover there.

Most of the eleven are private: the pilot flies only the people in the booking, with no other passengers added to fill the aircraft. Two of the helicopter flights — the one that visits the guitar-shaped Hard Rock hotel tower and the beach, and the one that departs Fort Lauderdale — list as small group instead, which is one reason they sit where they do on the price table.

The Miami Private Helicopter Tour and the Hard Rock flight both stay close to the city, over the beach line and the guitar-shaped Hard Rock hotel tower. The South Beach flight and the sunset flight both range wider, over South Beach, Downtown Miami, Key Biscayne and Fisher Island, with Biscayne Bay underneath for most of the route. The champagne flight for two covers the same private ground, timed for a date or an anniversary rather than the daylight view.

The two flights that lift off outside Miami cover different ground first. The Fort Lauderdale flight crosses down toward Miami Beach along the coast; the Pembroke Pines flight runs east toward the same city from the other side. Both land you looking at the same skyline the Miami-based flights start from.

The three plane flights run lower and slower over similar ground: Downtown Miami, South Beach and the coastline, with Brickell and Coconut Grove visible on the longer of the three. A plane cannot land on the water or a rooftop pad the way a helicopter can, but it covers the same skyline for a lower price per minute.

Three more listings on this site never leave the water or the ground, and some searches for a Miami helicopter tour are really looking for one of these instead. The Biscayne Bay cruise runs past the row of celebrity homes for $20 and is the single most reviewed listing on the whole site at 9,295 reviews — more than any of the eleven flights above. The same cruise threads past Star Island, which is why it turns up in some searches as a Star Island tour Miami. A faster version of the same bay, the Miami sightseeing speedboat tour, runs $52 for forty-five minutes. Neither is a flight, and neither is sold as one.

The Everglades airboat run, $32, covers different ground entirely: sawgrass and mangrove swamp west of the city, with a wildlife show that includes a baby alligator, rather than any part of the Miami skyline. Between the bay cruise, the speedboat and the Everglades swamp, there is a Miami water tour for every budget below any of the eleven flights — none of them airborne.

Some things this site does not book: there is no snorkeling tour, no walking tour, and no yacht charter among the eleven flights or the three water trips — the bay cruise and the speedboat both run as shared group trips, not a private yacht tour. There is no night tour either — the closest listed is the sunset flight, and none of the fourteen listings on this site is sold as a night trip. And nothing on this site goes from Miami to Key West; every listing starts and lands in Miami, Fort Lauderdale or Pembroke Pines.

Price is the other reason people land on the water trips instead of a flight. The bay cruise at $20 costs less than a tenth of the cheapest helicopter flight, and the speedboat and airboat both sit well under any of the eleven flights too. None of that makes them a substitute for one — a cruise does not leave the water and a flight does not touch it — but it explains why the same search sometimes turns up a boat listing instead of a flight.