Quick Summary
Split is the gateway to Croatia's famous islands. Private charter offers exclusive access to hidden coves and flexible timing.
Half-day to full-day options. Blue Cave visits possible.
The reason a charter is not simply a more expensive ferry: the state-subsidised fast boats out of Split sail island to Split in the early morning and Split to island in the late afternoon, because the network exists to carry islanders to the mainland for a working day. Its direction of travel is the opposite of a day trip out of Split. For two or three destinations the car ferry still wins and we will tell you so. For the rest of the map there is no public answer at all.
What's Included & Not Included
✓ What's Included
- Private boat + skipper
- Fuel
- Flexible routing
- Swim stops
- Trade proposal
✗ What's Not Included
- Blue Cave entry
- Lunch
- Gratuities
Blue Cave entry is excluded for a reason, not as a hidden extra. Visiting Modra špilja is possible only as organised by the concessionaire under its concession contract, and its published ticket bundles the small-boat transfer and the entry as one separate charge. No charter operator can include it, because no charter operator sells it. We show it as its own line.
Best For
Tour Highlights
- Choose your islands
- Blue Cave (conditions permitting)
- Swim in hidden coves
- Hvar wine tasting
- Flexible pace
What the public boats can and cannot do
Hours ashore, computed from the official 2026 timetables, so you can see where a charter actually earns its place
The useful number for an island day is not the crossing time and not the fare. It is hours ashore: the arrival of the outbound sailing subtracted from the departure of the last return that still gets the client back to Split the same evening. Below is that subtraction, from the 2026 timetables published by the state coastal liner agency and by the carriers, checked on 17 September 2026.
| Destination | Public same-day return? | Hours ashore | What that means for a charter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supetar, Brač | Yes, every day of the year | 8 h 40 peak, 8 h 10 off-season | The car ferry is excellent. Charter only for routing freedom or multiple bays. |
| Stari Grad, Hvar | Yes, every day of the year | 7 h 10, up to 13 h 10 in peak | Ferry works, but it lands 26 km from Hvar town. |
| Rogač, Šolta | Yes | 7 h 15 peak, 5 h 15 off-season | Ferry works in summer; off-season the window is tight. |
| Hvar town | Yes, in season by commercial catamaran | 6 h 10 to 11 h 55 | Good public option in season only, and the fares are commercial. |
| Vis town | Part of the year, and never on a Tuesday in peak | 6 h 40 by ferry; 2 h 10 on a peak Tuesday | The weekday trap. A charter removes it entirely. |
| Bol, Brač | One commercial sailing only | 5 h 00 | Not in the state system. Must be re-confirmed for the date. |
| Milna and Sutivan, Brač | No | 30 minutes | Charter or nothing. |
| Korčula town, Vela Luka, Ubli | No | Overnight unavoidable | Do not sell as a day trip on any boat we can verify. |
| Biševo and the Blue Cave | No boat from Split at all | — | Commercial excursion or charter only. |
| Stiniva, Ravnik, Budikovac, Palmižana | No scheduled service whatsoever | — | This is the row that justifies a charter. |
Two honest notes. Two of those car-ferry timetables, for Stari Grad and Rogač, are published by the operator as provisional 2026 timetables, and the best multi-carrier source for the commercial sailings is valid only from 7 September 2026 and carries its own disclaimer that carriers may change it. A boat timetable is the most perishable fact in this business, so we confirm the specific sailing for the client's date every time rather than quoting a page, including this one.
And the point most charter pages will not make: there is public transport to Biševo. A state boat line runs Komiža to Mezuporat in 45 minutes for a few euros, and Mezuporat is exactly where the cave boats leave from. Getting to Biševo is cheap and scheduled. Getting inside the cave is only ever through the concessionaire. The accurate claim about a five-island itinerary is therefore not that the places are unreachable, it is that no public transport replicates the route.
The Blue Cave: what is actually published
A protected natural monument since 1951, visited only through a concession
Modra špilja on Biševo is a nationally designated natural monument, protected since 1951, covering 1.84 hectares, and Biševo sits inside two Natura 2000 sites within the wider Vis marine area. Oversight sits with the county's public institution for protected areas, whose nature wardens police the site and specifically check that concessionaires holding an organised-visiting permit keep to the conditions attached to it.
Access is a concession, not a market. The official wording is that visiting the cave is possible exclusively as organised by the concessionaire, under a concession-award contract, and that the cave cannot be visited without a ticket. One correction to a claim that circulates widely: no current official source describes an association or društvo as the access-holder. The official term for the boatman is barkarijol, a single boatman operating under the concessionaire.
| Concessionaire ticket | High season 20 Jun – 10 Sep | Off season 1 Apr – 19 Jun and 11 Sep – 31 Oct |
|---|---|---|
| Adult, over 12 | €24.00 | €18.00 |
| Child 6–12 | €12.00 | €9.00 |
| Child under 6 | Free | Free |
| Private transfer, min 2 and max 12 people | €660.00 per transfer | €460.00 per transfer |
Prices are VAT inclusive and the ticket covers one transfer and the cave visit as a single charge, plus same-day entry to the Biševo visitor-centre exhibition. A private transfer must be booked at least one working day ahead, and in July and August only two may run at once, and only between 10:00 and 14:00.
The caveat we will not bury: that is the 2025 price list, and no 2026 list has been published. As of 17 September 2026 the concessionaire's own price pages still link only the list headed as in application from 1 June 2025, and the plausible 2026 paths return nothing. We quote it as the current published tariff, not as a 2026 tariff, and we re-confirm before it goes into a client document.
The mechanism, precisely. Visits leave from Mezuporat cove, where you transfer to the concessionaire's small boat with its boatman for a run of about 20 minutes. No official source describes a transfer in open water at the cave mouth, so we do not write that. The entrance passage is 1.5 m high and 2.4 m wide; the cave is 10 to 12 m wide and 24 m long, with three entrances, one of them submerged. It lies in uvala Balun on the east side of Biševo, 4.5 nautical miles from Komiža, and takes around 50,000 visitors a year. A 2019 survey recorded 119 marine taxa, five of them strictly protected by law.
Inside, the rules are the protected-area rules. Prohibited: moving under the vessel's own power; anchoring or mooring; taking, catching or disturbing wild species; depositing waste; fishing; lighting devices or fires; and, specific to Modra špilja, swimming and diving. Commercial filming and photography require a permit from the managing institution. Clients should also be told not to apply sunscreen before swimming in sea caves.
When to go, including a nuance the official sources themselves disagree on. The Komiža tourist board, a public body, states that the best time to visit is between 10:00 and 14:00, and the July–August private-transfer window corroborates it. But the concessionaire's own geological account puts the optimum in the earlier part of the morning, because the low eastern sun reflects off the light sandy floor at the submerged entrance, a mechanism identified in 2019 research. So: inside 10:00 to 14:00, and early within it.
Season and hours. A 1 April to 31 October season is the best available reading, derived from the fact that the concessionaire publishes no tariff outside those dates, but no official page states it in words. Daily opening hours are not published at all. One trap worth naming: the hours block on the Komiža tourist board's cave page and on the managing institution's page are the office hours of those bodies, sitting in page footers. They are not the cave's hours, and they would be easy to publish as if they were.
The related visitor centre on Biševo has its own published tariff, with free entry for tourist guides and group leaders accompanying school and kindergarten groups, expert guiding for groups of 12 to 20 priced per group, and group visits requiring booking at least two working days ahead. That is the only published group provision anywhere in the Blue Cave material.
Two different "Blue Lagoons"
Disambiguate this at brief stage, because the two places are 60 km apart and differently regulated
Budikovac, off Vis
The one a Split five-island itinerary normally means. It sits inside the Natura 2000 sites covering Vis and its south-eastern flank, but it carries no national protected-area designation at all — we checked the register across the whole envelope and the result was a genuine negative, not a failed query. No scheduled public service reaches it.
Krknjaši, Drvenik Veli
A bay on the east side of Drvenik Veli at the eastern end of the Drvenik Channel, enclosed by the two Krknjaš islets seaward. It is a semi-enclosed bay between an island and two islets, not a channel and not a lagoon in any technical sense. Natura 2000 site, 37.55 hectares. Reached by car ferry from Trogir, not Split.
Why Krknjaši is turquoise, officially. The Natura 2000 record for the site lists as a qualifying habitat 6.25 hectares of sandbanks slightly covered by sea water all the time, alongside 14 hectares of Posidonia beds, a priority habitat, and 7 hectares of reefs. So the bright shallow part is a permanently submerged sandbank. Note the county anchorage plan puts the anchorage itself at depths of up to 20 m: the bay as a whole is not uniformly shallow.
And it is regulated, with a hard cap. One designated anchorage field of 28,568 m² along the west shore of Krknjaš Veli, maximum capacity 50 vessels. Because the site is inside the Natura 2000 network, ecological permanent moorings adapted to the seabed type are obligatory. A separate submarine cable runs out of the bay towards Šolta, clearly marked with an anchoring prohibition. A second anchorage field was deliberately deleted after consultation because it obstructed the operational quay and spoiled the view of Krknjaš, and the surviving field was then enlarged expressly because of the great nautical pressure at the location. That is officially documented overtourism at this exact bay, and it is worth knowing before a client is promised an empty turquoise bay in August.
Exposure, which is the operational part. The plan states the location is suitable for anchoring in bura and westerlies, while southerly and south-easterly winds generate waves in the bay. Note that this is the same wind direction that closes the Blue Cave, so a single day's weather can take out both anchors of a combined itinerary. That is the kind of correlation a routing decision should be built on.
There is no entrance fee at Krknjaši and none is provided for. It is open sea and coast under the maritime-domain regime, and unlike Modra špilja there is no concession for organised visiting and therefore no ticket. A mooring charge is legally possible but we could not confirm one is levied, so we do not quote one.
The "five-island tour", and what can honestly be said about it
No official or public-sector body defines, names, standardises or regulates a five-island itinerary. Not the national tourist board, not the county board, not Komiža, not the managing institution for the protected areas. Any stop list is operator marketing rather than a sourced fact, and we treat it as such.
What is verifiable, and more useful to an advisor than a stop list, is the official status of each place the product is built around.
| Place | Official status | Protected since | Area |
|---|---|---|---|
| Modra špilja, Biševo | Natural monument | 1951 | 1.84 ha |
| Uvala Stiniva, Vis | Significant landscape | 1967 | 4.12 ha |
| Ravnik, the Green Cave | Significant landscape | 1967 | 27.3 ha |
| Pakleni otoci, Palmižana | Significant landscape | 1968 | 712.88 ha |
| Budikovac | No national designation, Natura 2000 only | — | — |
| Hvar town | A town; no designation applicable | — | — |
Four of those six are legally protected sites where the route itself is constrained by nature-protection rules rather than by taste. That is a better reason to use an operator who knows them than any adjective about hidden coves.
Operational Notes
Embarkation
ACI Marina typically.
Weather
Routing adjusts.
Islands
Hvar popular, Vis authentic, Brač beaches.
Getting the group to the boat
Split designates a paid coach terminal on the Riva at Obala Lazareta. From 1 April to 31 October each coach entry for drop-off or pick-up is capped at 15 minutes, 60 minutes in winter, at €19.91 for a 9 to 20 seat mini-bus, €39.82 for a 20 to 35 seat midi-bus and €79.63 for a coach over 35 seats in summer. A published agency volume discount runs 20, 30 and 40 per cent by monthly entries, but only on a postpaid contract — prepaid vouchers are not aggregated across a month. A separate act designates five minivan spaces on Trumbićeva obala for 15-minute agency pick-up and drop-off against a permit.
Where the coach waits, which is the real problem
The long-stay coach park at Kopilica was formally abolished in 2020 and nothing replaced it. So Split publishes a 15-minute drop-off and no published place for a coach to sit out an eight-hour boat day. Anyone still citing Kopilica is working from a dead act. For a coach-borne charter group this has to be planned before the boat is booked, not after.
Weather-fallback routing
The closing wind for both the Blue Cave and Krknjaši is the southerly, so an itinerary built on both has a single point of failure. We hold a fallback island on the sheltered side and decide on the morning. Šolta and Supetar are the usual answers, being short crossings into level towns.
Port arrival, if any leg is on a scheduled boat
Where a day combines a charter with a scheduled ferry leg, the carrier's published guidance is 30 minutes before departure in winter with a reservation, 40 minutes with cargo, and 60 minutes in the summer period. Note that the busiest Brač crossing, Split to Supetar, is not on the carrier's vehicle reservation list at all, which for a self-drive client in August is a material planning point.
Options & Upgrades
Blue Cave
Famous natural attraction.
Wine Tasting
Hvar winery stop.
Green Cave, Ravnik
A significant landscape protected since 1967, and a site where swimming is part of the visit rather than prohibited as it is inside Modra špilja. Sequenced after the Blue Cave slot.
Stiniva, Vis
A significant landscape of 4.12 hectares protected since 1967, with no scheduled public service of any kind. Sea state decides it.
Island options & routing
Match the boat to the brief — here is how the main islands differ
Hvar (~1 hr)
Croatia's most fashionable island — a Venetian harbour town, beach clubs, lavender fields, and the Pakleni islets just offshore for swimming. Best for clients who want buzz, dining, and wine. Pair with a winery stop inland. For reference, the scheduled crossing to Hvar town is 65 minutes by commercial catamaran, while the car ferry takes 110 minutes and lands at Stari Grad, 26 km away.
Brač (~45 min)
The closest hop and home to Zlatni Rat, Croatia's iconic shifting-pebble beach at Bol. Great for a beach-focused half or full day, and the easiest option in shoulder season or lighter weather. Worth knowing: the scheduled car ferry reaches Supetar in 50 minutes, but Supetar is 36 km and 51 minutes by road from Zlatni Rat, and Bol itself has no usable state-network day return.
Vis & the Blue Cave (full day)
The furthest and most authentic island — a former military base opened to tourism only in the 1990s, with quiet coves, Komiža fishing village, and the Blue and Green caves at nearby Biševo. A full-day commitment, weather-permitting. The scheduled alternative is a 2 h 20 car ferry, and in peak season its Tuesday timetable leaves only 2 h 10 ashore.
Šolta (~30 min)
The low-key neighbour — olive groves, small bays, and far fewer crowds. Ideal for a relaxed half-day or a swim-and-lunch escape close to Split. It is also the cheapest scheduled island run from Split and the least marketed, which makes it the best answer for a client who wants an island with no crowds and to be back for dinner.
How we plan the day
Private charter means the route is built around your clients, not a ferry timetable. We confirm embarkation at ACI Marina Split, coordinate the hotel transfer, and hold a weather buffer for open crossings to Vis or the Blue Cave. For multi-day sailing or larger groups, see our boats & yachts service, and the Split 4-Day Islands itinerary for a ready-to-sell structure. Full activity list on the Split hub. If a scheduled boat does the job better, our day trips from Split guide has the hours-ashore arithmetic for every island.
What we will not publish, and why that is the point
Most of what goes wrong in this subject is a confident number with no source behind it. So, plainly, here is what we could not verify and therefore do not state anywhere on this page.
- No 2026 Blue Cave price list exists. We quote the 2025 list as the current published one and label it that way.
- No sea-state threshold for a cave closure is published by anybody. No Beaufort number, no wave height, no wind speed.
- No daily opening hours for the Blue Cave are published by the concessionaire or any public body.
- No mooring charge at Krknjaši could be confirmed as levied, although one is legally possible.
- No timetable or fare from the commercial fast-boat carriers is verified here. Their own pages do not serve a readable schedule, and one of them gives two different prices for the same city pair on two of its own pages.
- No vessel names, passenger capacities or vehicle capacities for scheduled boats, because the timetables do not state them.
- No group tariff or trade discount on any ferry or catamaran line, because none is published. Groups go through the carrier's business desk.
- No walking distance from the Drvenik Veli ferry port to Krknjaši, because we could not source the port's exact position.
- No hours ashore for Korčula, because the consolidated sheet gives departure times for the Hvar to Korčula legs without arrivals, so the chain is arithmetically plausible and not quantifiable.
Every figure that is on this page comes from a named official document: the 2026 timetables and tariffs of the state coastal liner agency and the carriers, the Blue Cave concessionaire's published tariff and rules, the managing institution and the Komiža tourist board, the county nautical anchorage plan of January 2024, the European protected-area and Natura 2000 registers, and the City of Split gazette. All were checked on 17 September 2026, and we re-check before anything goes into a client document.
Sell Kit
30-Second Pitch
"Split has the best island access in Croatia. Private means your clients choose everything."
Handling Objections
Suggested Upsells
Client-Facing Blurb
PRIVATE BOAT – ISLANDS Your choice of Hvar, Brač, Vis, Šolta. Duration: 4–10 hours.
FAQ
It depends on the brief. Hvar suits clients who want a lively harbour town, beach clubs, and wine; Vis rewards those after a quieter, more authentic feel and the Blue and Green caves; Brač is best for beaches (Zlatni Rat) and is the closest hop; Šolta is the low-key option for a short half-day. We route to interests rather than a fixed itinerary.
Yes, but it is a full-day trip from Split (the cave is at Biševo, near Vis) and entry depends on sea conditions and the live boarding queue. Entry is legally available only through the concessionaire: you transfer at Mezuporat cove to its small boat with its boatman for a run of about 20 minutes, and the entry ticket is a separate charge from the excursion. We build in a weather buffer, book inside the 10:00 to 14:00 window and take the early slot within it, and always flag that entry is never guaranteed by the sea.
Because the state fast-boat network out of Split runs against a day trip. Every subsidised catamaran sails island to Split in the early morning and Split to island in the late afternoon, since it exists to carry islanders to the mainland. The car ferries do work in both directions, and where they do we will say so rather than sell you a boat you do not need. Where they do not, a private boat is not a luxury, it is the only way the day exists.
Korčula town, Vela Luka, Ubli on Lastovo, and Milna and Sutivan on Brač have no viable same-day public return from Split in 2026. Bol works only on a single commercial sailing that has to be re-confirmed for the date. Biševo and the Blue Cave, Stiniva, Ravnik and the Green Cave, Budikovac and Palmižana have no scheduled service that replicates the itinerary at all. That is the honest case for a charter.
Speedboats typically seat 4–8 passengers for day trips; larger groups are handled with bigger vessels or multiple boats quoted on request. Larger yachts for overnight or luxury charters are available through our boats & yachts service. We do not publish passenger or vehicle capacities for scheduled vessels, because the operators do not publish them either.
The season runs roughly May–October. May and October are calmer and cheaper but the sea can be cool for swimming and open-water crossings (Vis, Blue Cave) are more weather-dependent — for those months we lean toward closer islands like Brač and Šolta. The Blue Cave concessionaire publishes no tariff outside 1 April to 31 October, which is the best available indication of its season.
Jugo, the southerly, is the closing wind, and with an entrance 1.5 m high and 2.4 m wide any real swell is disqualifying. But no official body publishes a Beaufort number or a wave-height threshold, and we searched the concessionaire and the managing institution for one. The actual mechanism is a live conditions and queue display that reports the current state rather than a rule. If anyone quotes you a wind threshold for the cave, it is unverified.
There are two and they are different places. The one in a Split five-island itinerary is normally Budikovac, off Vis, which has no national protected-area designation. The other is Krknjaši, a bay on the east side of Drvenik Veli near Trogir, which is a Natura 2000 site with a designated anchorage capped at 50 vessels, mandatory ecological moorings, and a marked submarine cable under an absolute anchoring ban. We confirm which one the brief means before quoting a route.
No. Swimming and diving inside Modra špilja are specifically prohibited under the protected-area rules and the concession, along with moving the vessel under its own power, anchoring, and lighting. Swim stops belong elsewhere on the route. The Green Cave at Ravnik is a different site with a different status.
Usually ACI Marina Split or the town waterfront, confirmed at booking with the exact pontoon and meeting time. We coordinate the transfer from the client hotel so embarkation is smooth. For a coach-borne group, note that Split caps a coach entry at the Riva at 15 minutes from April to October and publishes no long-stay coach park, so where the vehicle goes during the boat day has to be planned, not improvised.