Hawaii Snorkel Tours — Local services in Hawaii

Overall fair experience. The dive itself was quite impressive and beautiful, no doubt. Manta rays are truly majestic and impressive animals, even though we only saw many in the last 5 minutes (absolutely no blame on the company, it’s nature). But the whole experience behind it left us a little disappointed. As others have written (and appreciated) they played loud music on the (fast) way in and out. That’s fun for some, we were rather looking for a quiet and serene atmosphere. There were also few to none explanations on Manta rays themselves, we were just shoved in and out of the water (keep in mind they do 2 tours per night). The team felt still unexperienced (probably new company). Overall it felt very commercial, with little care given to the animals. Typical colonisation of nature/ extractive tourism industry. My point: if you just want to see Manta’s and don’t care about the rest go ahead. If you want to avoid being a haole (dumb tourist in hawaiian), rethink if it’s really worth it. Note that most companies will probably offer a comparable...

Captain Chad and Big Island Snorkel Tours was amazing!!! Chad is a Coast Guard Captain and puts safety first— he gave us a heads up in advance to let us know our ride might be bumpier than usual and offered us a refund if we wanted to cancel, but said that it was safe (very safe— the boat is rated for 40mph winds!) and we are SO GLAD WE WENT!!! It was AMAZING!! Chad is so knowledgeable about Hawaii and is definitely a “water person”— he has personally dived and explored the entire stretch of coastline we saw, and shared much knowledge of local lava tubes, various cool caves and grottos, and more! He also snorkeled a bit with us and showed us sea cucumbers and SO MANY different kinds of fish and other cool creatures! This was not the “dolphin tour” (we are doing that in a few days) but would highly recommend as we saw sooooo many sea creatures and beautiful coral!!! Super fun, relaxing and amazing experience!! 10 out of 10 would do it again as...

We’re family of four with 2 young children ages 6 and 8, and we all enjoyed the tour very much! They made sure we saw the manta rays and didn’t rush us at all, it was a slow night, so they rescheduled the next tour to make sure we got to see the animals. We were lucky enough to eventually get 4 mantas that night, and they get realllly close to you doing barrel rolls; my older son didn’t even want to return to the boat. Captain Kelly made sure we were safe in the waters and even help with escorting kids back to the boat. They offer wetsuits, I would recommend getting them. The boat is a zodiac speed boat, it’s a quick 10-15 min ride out holding on to the railing the...