Cebu to Bohol by ferry
The busiest fast-craft route in the Visayas, roughly hourly — and the one that sells out at weekends.
1 legs · 1 day · 0 borders · about $12 all in
Open this route in the planner Change the pace, the beds or the passport and the numbers follow.
Ramir Borja derivative work: MrPanyGoff · CC BY-SA 3.0Pragmatic routing
Cebu Bohol overland
Cebu to Bohol is not a rail journey — the railways do not come here, and the water is the way through: 1 leg (1 by sea) across 1 country, with 0 frontiers in between. The one to watch: The Cebu City – Tagbilaran boat is weather-dependent. It works and it is comfortable enough, but the journey here is transport rather than the reward — plan the stops, not just the legs.
Stations that catch people out
- Cebu City The hinge of the whole archipelago. Almost every Visayan ferry route touches it, which is why it is usually the shortest way between two islands that look adjacent on a map.
The route
Durations are typical scheduled running times, not departures, and the figure under each service is how often it runs — the number that decides whether a missed connection costs you an hour or a day. Where a last departure is shown it is the one worth setting an alarm for. No planner in this region can give you a departure time you should trust: the operators publish nothing in common. Take these legs to the booking sites below and read the real clock there.
| Leg & operator | Time | Fare | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cebu City Tagbilaran OceanJet Reported OceanJet Cebu – Tagbilaran 10 a day · roughly hourly, 06:00 to 18:00 last 18:00 Hourly-ish and the busiest tourist crossing in the country. Weekends and holidays genuinely sell out — this is the one Philippine boat worth booking ahead. Book with OceanJetoceanjet.net | 2h | $12 |
What stops running, and when
Not a timetable — this planner will not print a departure time it cannot stand behind, and no two operators here publish in a way that would let it. This is the other half of the question, and the half that strands people: which legs stop for the day, and how late. Nobody misses a connection for want of knowing the 14:05 existed. They miss it because the last boat went at 17:00.
Plan backwards from the 18:00 Cebu to Bohol — it is the earliest door to close on this route.
| Leg | Runs | Last |
|---|---|---|
| Cebu City Tagbilaran OceanJet Cebu – Tagbilaran | roughly hourly, 06:00 to 18:00 | 18:00 |
Where this breaks
Ranked by what actually ends trips, not by probability. A missed last connection costs a day and an unplanned hotel; a missed afternoon connection costs an afternoon.
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note
The Cebu City – Tagbilaran boat is weather-dependent
Ferries are cancelled rather than delayed, and a cancellation costs a day rather than an afternoon.
What to do. Never make this crossing the only path to a fixed commitment. Leave a slack day between it and any flight home.
Booking sequence
Book in order of scarcity times window length, not in the order you travel. The shortest leg on the whole spine sells out first.
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1
Cebu – Tagbilaran
~14 days
The busiest tourist crossing in the Philippines and the one that genuinely sells out at weekends.
Books online. The Cebu–Bohol sailings fill at weekends and around holidays; the rest of the network is usually walk-up.
Book with OceanJetoceanjet.net -
2
Sea legs
Mostly turn-up-and-go
Langkawi and Samui routes are worth pre-booking in season, the Mekong slow boat the day before you sail, and the Philippine RORO crossings not at all — they are grounded or they are running.
Where an operator cannot be booked from abroad — the Laos–China Railway above all — an aggregator is the practical route in. They add a fee, and some sell tickets they do not yet hold and buy them when inventory opens, which is a genuine cancellation risk on a scarce sleeper. Prefer the operator wherever the operator actually works, which is most of the time.
No affiliate links on transport. Every booking link above goes straight to the operator or aggregator and earns this project nothing. The operator's own site is listed first because it is usually cheaper and always more reliable, not because of what it pays — that ordering is the most load-bearing judgement on this page and it is not for sale. Booking URLs were last reviewed 2026-07 and are not machine-checked — if one is dead, search the operator name rather than trusting a reseller that ranks well.
Where it does earn. The hotel links in “Where you sleep” and the insurance link below pay a commission, at no extra cost to you. They are marked as paid links. Nothing about them changes a route, a price, or the order of anything: no hotel is recommended over another and no leg is routed differently because of them.
Costs
| Transport, 1 legs | $12 |
| Accommodation, 0 nights | $0 |
| Total | $12 |
Against flying
1 day, $12, 1 legs versus a flight of roughly 50m gate to gate at somewhere around $32–66. That fare band is estimated from the 72 km great-circle distance, not from live inventory — check it.
On a trip this short the train is genuinely competitive, and it puts you in the middle of a city rather than an hour outside one.
If you have more time
Where the slow-travel value actually is — the detours that turn a transit into a trip.
Bohol, an hour and a half from the pier
+2 nights, ~$24OceanJet runs Cebu to Tagbilaran most of the day. Chocolate Hills, the Loboc river and Panglao's beaches are all inside a day of the port, and Siquijor is one more boat beyond. If you are passing through Cebu at all, this is the cheapest good decision available.
Photography
- Magellan's Cross — Carlo Joseph Moskito, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Chocolate Hills — Ramir Borja derivative work: MrPanyGoff, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons