Three crossings and little else
Quintana Roo is crossed by boat far more often than most visitors expect. Three routes carry almost all the passenger traffic: Playa del Carmen to Cozumel, Chiquilá to Holbox, and Puerto Juárez to Isla Mujeres. None of them takes more than forty-five minutes, all run frequently through daylight hours, and none needs booking ahead except during Easter week or the last week of December. They are public transport rather than excursions, and they work with the logic of a city bus: you turn up, buy a ticket at the window and wait for the next departure.
What changes from one crossing to another is the water they cross. The Cozumel channel is deep and open, and it moves a good deal when the northerly blows; the Holbox run cuts across a shallow lagoon and is usually flat; the Isla Mujeres hop is short and partly sheltered. That difference explains why some routes keep sick bags on the counter and others do not. It also helps to know that published timetables are kept reasonably well, but the last boat of the night is the one thing you cannot improvise: missing it means sleeping somewhere unplanned.
Playa del Carmen – Cozumel
The Playa del Carmen to Cozumel crossing is the busiest in the country and also the dearest per minute afloat. Departures usually run about once an hour from early morning until ten or eleven at night, split between two companies working the same pair of piers in central Playa. The trip takes between thirty and forty-five minutes depending on the boat and the state of the channel. A return ticket comes to roughly $25 – $45 USD (2025), and there is little point buying ahead except on the busiest dates of the year.
A car is unnecessary on Cozumel for most plans, but a vehicle ferry does exist, leaving from Punta Venado a few kilometres south of Playa del Carmen, with only a few sailings a day and a separate fare. If you are going over to dive, eat and come back, the sensible move is to cross on foot and rent on the island. At the Playa pier, allow fifteen minutes of queueing in high season and a good deal more when a cruise ship has just landed. The terminal sits at the foot of Quinta Avenida, so no transfer is needed.
Chiquilá – Holbox
Holbox is reached through Chiquilá, a small village at the end of a long road that leads nowhere else. Boats cross the lagoon in twenty to thirty minutes and leave roughly every half hour from five or six in the morning until about half past nine at night, with two operators alternating from the same pier. A one-way ticket runs around $6 – $12 USD (2025), bought at the window without any reservation. It is the cheapest of the three crossings and also the calmest, because the water on that side rarely moves much.
The car stays in Chiquilá, because no cars run on the island: there are golf carts, scooters and sand. Several guarded car parks sit beside the pier and charge somewhere around $5 – $12 USD (2025) a day, paid when you collect the vehicle, and it is worth keeping the ticket. Anyone arriving by bus from Cancún or Mérida is dropped two hundred metres from the jetty. What does demand attention is the return: in winter the last boat leaves while it is still light, and being stranded on the mainland with a paid room on the island is a common mistake.
Puerto Juárez – Isla Mujeres
Isla Mujeres is the simplest of the three crossings and the one that needs least planning. Boats leave Puerto Juárez, at the northern end of Cancún, every half hour from very early until close to midnight, and the crossing takes twenty to twenty-five minutes. There are also departures from three points along the hotel zone, more convenient if you are sleeping there, but pricier and slower because they skirt the lagoon before reaching open water. A return ticket from Puerto Juárez usually costs around $20 – $35 USD (2025) per person, bought on the spot.
Taking a car across needs a different ferry, from Punta Sam a little further north, with only a handful of daily sailings and a slower crossing. Almost nobody needs it: the island is eight kilometres long and can be covered end to end by golf cart or taxi. It is worth knowing that Puerto Juárez is reachable by city bus or by taxi from central Cancún for very little money, and that outside the terminal on the island there are always more golf carts waiting than there are passengers to fill them.
Luggage, seasickness and where to sit
Luggage is rarely a problem on any of the three routes. Cases go into a common area by the entrance or on the lower deck, untagged and free of charge, and you pick them up as you step off; on the fuller sailings a porter stacks them and waits for a tip. There is no practical weight limit, only a common-sense one: hauling two large suitcases up a narrow gangway in swell is miserable. Anyone heading to Holbox for a few days would do well to travel with a backpack, because sand streets begin right after the pier.
Seasickness deserves its own line, above all in the Cozumel channel between November and March, when the northers come through. The old rule holds: the lower and the more central your seat, the less you feel the movement; the top deck and the forward rows are the worst places to be. If your stomach is delicate, take something half an hour before boarding rather than afterwards, eat lightly and watch the horizon instead of your phone. Crews hand out bags without being asked when the day is rough, which tells you most of what you need to know.
The mistakes people keep making
The most expensive mistake has nothing to do with the boat and everything to do with the flight. Plenty of people book a midday departure from Cancún while staying on Cozumel or Holbox, and the margin is eaten by the ferry, the road transfer and hotel-zone traffic. From Cozumel you need the crossing plus a long hour to the airport; from Holbox, the crossing plus two and a half hours of road. The reasonable rule is not to fly on the day you leave an island, and if there is no choice, take the first boat of the morning.
The second mistake is buying tickets anywhere other than the official window. All three terminals attract middlemen offering packages with transport, food or discounts in exchange for a ninety-minute presentation at a hotel, and the real saving is small or nonexistent. The third is treating the ferry as an organised excursion: it is not, it waits for nobody and there is no pick-up service. The fourth, less obvious, is booking a room on an island for a late arrival without having checked the last sailing, which on some routes shifts with the season.
What people always ask
Six questions that come up before anyone buys a first ticket, answered with what can honestly be stated. Exact timetables shift from season to season and from operator to operator, so what follows are ranges rather than precise minutes; the board at the pier outranks any website, including this one. What does not change is the structure: high frequency through the day, short crossings, tickets bought at the window, and a last night sailing worth checking on the same day you plan to come back. That is enough to move between the three islands without drama.
One thing that does not fit into a short answer is worth adding. The three islands can be seen on the same trip, but not on the same day, and stringing them together by road costs more time than the map suggests: Cozumel to Chiquilá is a long half day of boat, bus and waiting. Picking two and staying two or three nights in each works far better than attempting all three at a run. The ferry is the easy part of the plan; the overland transfer between piers is what actually eats the day.