Miami private tour: every flight with nobody else aboard

Every Miami private tour on this page states its own group type on the live listing, and nine of the eleven flights on the whole site say private: the pilot flies only the people in the booking, with no other passengers added to fill the aircraft. That covers six of the eight helicopter flights — everything except the Hard Rock flight and the flight out of Fort Lauderdale — and all three plane flights.

The two that are not private list as small group instead, which is a different booking: other travellers can be added to the same aircraft until it is full. Nothing about either flight is lesser for it — it is simply how the operator sells the seat, and neither one appears on this page.

The cheapest private flight and the sunset flight both stay close to the city: Biscayne Bay, the beach line and the skyline over South Beach and Downtown Miami. The South Beach flight ranges wider still, adding Key Biscayne and Fisher Island to the same private route. The champagne flight for two covers similar ground, timed for a date or an anniversary rather than the standard daylight run.

The Pembroke Pines flight is private but starts from outside Miami, crossing in toward the same skyline the other private flights start from. The two private plane flights, over Downtown Miami, South Beach, Brickell and Coconut Grove, and the full-hour plane flight cover similar ground at a lower price per minute than any private helicopter on this page.

None of the three water trips on this site — the Biscayne Bay cruise, the sightseeing speedboat and the Everglades airboat run — book as a private charter. All three are shared group departures, so there is no private boat tour Miami, no private yacht tour Miami, and no private speedboat tour in Miami among them, and no private high-speed boat charter either: the bay cruise and the speedboat both fill the boat with other bookings the same way the small-group helicopter flights do.

The same goes for a longer trip on the water. There is no 2-hour private boat tour Miami, no private sunset boat tour, no private night boat tour, and no private Everglades tour from Miami booked through this site — every water trip here runs on the operator’s own shared schedule. A private helicopter ride Miami is the closest this site comes to a private hour in the air over that same water, since several of the nine flights above pass directly over Biscayne Bay.

Group size is the other thing that separates a private flight from a shared boat trip. On a private flight, every seat that is booked and paid for belongs to the same party; on the bay cruise or the speedboat, the operator can add other bookings up to the boat’s own capacity. That is not a flaw in either kind of trip — it is simply why a private flight costs more per minute than a shared boat.

Every one of the nine private flights on this page carries free cancellation ahead of its own cut-off, the same as the two small-group flights that are not included here. That is the one booking term that does not change between a private flight and a shared one — what changes is who else can be added to the aircraft, and the price that follows from it.

Price does not fall in a straight line with duration either. The two cheapest private flights, $189 and $87, are both twenty to thirty minutes; the most expensive, $493, is close to an hour. In between, a thirty-minute private flight can cost more or less than a twenty-seven-minute one depending on the listing, which is why this page lines all nine up by price rather than by length.

Four of the nine private flights are rated a perfect 5.0: the longest helicopter flight, the sunset flight, the champagne flight for two, and the flight out of Pembroke Pines. Three more sit at 4.8 or 4.9 — the South Beach helicopter flight and both of the two most reviewed plane flights — and the cheapest private flight of all rounds out the group at 4.9 across the largest helicopter review count on this page, 130.

Review counts vary far more than ratings do, from 4 reviews on the newest private listings up to 825 on the most booked plane flight. A small review count here is not a mark against the flight; several of the newer private listings simply have not been live as long as the others.