Bahamas Travel Guide
Curated by Our Guild Explorers · Updated August 2026
The Bahamas is not one destination but roughly seven hundred islands and two thousand cays strung across 800 kilometres of the western Atlantic, of which about thirty are inhabited and five or six matter to most travellers. That is the single most useful thing to understand before you book: choosing which island matters far more here than in most countries, because a week on New Providence and a week in the Exumas are entirely different holidays. Everything is in English, the currency is fixed to the US dollar, Miami is fifty minutes away by air, and the water — shallow, warm and lit from below by white sand — genuinely does look the way it looks in the photographs. This chapter covers Nassau and Paradise Island, Grand Bahama, the Exumas, Eleuthera and Harbour Island, and the quieter islands beyond them.
Where to stay — the Guild’s Bahamas guides
Five full “where to stay” guides, each with honest picks by style and a plain word about resort fees, beach quality and how far you really are from anything — plus our month-by-month guide to timing the trip.
Where to Stay in Nassau ›
Cable Beach against downtown and the cruise port — which side of the island suits which traveller, and where the ships put four thousand people on Bay Street at ten in the morning.
Where to Stay on Paradise Island ›
Atlantis and its neighbours across the bridge from Nassau — what the resort fee actually buys, and the quieter corners at the eastern end.
Where to Stay in Freeport ›
Grand Bahama’s Lucaya strip and the beaches beyond it — the best value beach holiday in the country, and an honest word on what is open.
Where to Stay in the Exumas ›
George Town, Emerald Bay and the cays — where to base yourself for the sandbars, the pigs and the clearest water in the Bahamas.
Where to Stay on Harbour Island ›
Three miles of pink sand, golf carts instead of cars, and a dozen small hotels that book out a year ahead for Christmas.
Best Time to Visit the Bahamas ›
Month by month, with sea temperatures, rainfall, the hurricane peak and the weeks when every room on New Providence is spoken for.
Bases that actually work: Cable Beach or Paradise Island if you want a resort with everything on site and Nassau within reach; downtown Nassau only if you specifically want the old town and do not mind the cruise crowds; Lucaya on Grand Bahama for the best value beach week in the country; George Town or Emerald Bay in the Exumas for boat days; Harbour Island for small hotels and pink sand. Two things to ask before you book anywhere in the Bahamas, because they catch people out every week. First, what is the total including VAT and the resort levy — ten per cent VAT plus a compulsory daily fee of anywhere from $40 to $150 is normal at the larger resorts, and it is rarely in the headline rate. Second, is the beach in front of the hotel actually swimmable, because a few properties sit on rock or on a harbour rather than sand.
One diary note: the country fills up twice. Christmas and New Year, when Junkanoo runs and Harbour Island books out a year ahead, and the American spring break through March, when Nassau and Paradise Island are at their busiest and dearest. If your dates are fixed in either window, book the room before the flight.
Elsewhere on this page, where we mention a settlement we have not yet written a full guide for, the link goes straight to that town’s hotels through our Trip.com partner.
The Bahamas at a glance
Fifty minutes from Florida, English-speaking, dollar-priced and spread across an area of ocean the size of California — the plain facts first.
Which island should you choose?
Five groups, five quite different holidays. Where the Guild has written a full guide the link goes to it; everywhere else it goes to that settlement’s hotels through our Trip.com partner.
New Providence — Nassau, Cable Beach & Paradise Island
Two-thirds of all Bahamians live on this one small island, and almost every visitor lands here. Nassau proper is a working capital with a colonial core: pastel government buildings around Parliament Square, the Queen’s Staircase cut by hand out of limestone, forts on the hills and the straw market on Bay Street. Cable Beach, twenty minutes west, is the hotel strip — a long arc of sand with the Baha Mar complex on it. Paradise Island, over a toll bridge to the north, is essentially Atlantis plus a handful of quieter hotels and the excellent Cabbage Beach. The honest warning about downtown: on a day with four or five cruise ships in port, Bay Street between ten and four is shoulder to shoulder. Go early, or go on a day when fewer ships are in.
- Nassau Guild guide
- Paradise Island Guild guide
Grand Bahama — Freeport & Lucaya
The second city and the best-value island in the country. Freeport itself is a planned town of wide roads and shopping centres that nobody visits for its charm; the reason to come is Lucaya, on the south shore, where a good beach, a walkable marketplace and a cluster of hotels sit together. Beyond it the island runs long and flat and almost empty: Gold Rock Beach inside Lucayan National Park is a mile of hard sand at low tide with nobody on it, and the same park holds one of the longest surveyed underwater cave systems in the world. Grand Bahama took a severe battering from Hurricane Dorian in 2019 and its recovery has been uneven — some hotels never reopened. Check that your specific hotel is trading before you book flights.
- Freeport & Lucaya Guild guide
The Exumas — 365 cays and the clearest water
If you have seen a photograph of the Bahamas that made you book a flight, it was probably taken here. The Exumas are a 130-mile chain of cays running southeast from Nassau, and the water over the banks turns a pale luminous green you will not quite believe. Great Exuma and George Town at its southern end are the base, with Emerald Bay a few miles north. The days are boat days: the sandbars that surface at low tide, the swimming pigs at Big Major Cay, the nurse sharks at Compass Cay, the underwater cave at Staniel Cay, and the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park, which has been a no-take marine reserve since 1958. Bring cash, book the boat before you arrive in high season, and do not expect nightlife.
- The Exumas Guild guide
- George Town
Eleuthera & Harbour Island — pink sand and pineapples
Eleuthera is a hundred miles long and rarely more than a mile wide, with the deep blue Atlantic on one side and the pale Bight of Eleuthera on the other — at the Glass Window Bridge the two are separated by a few metres of rock and you can see both colours at once. It is farmland, small settlements and empty beaches, with Governor’s Harbour as its centre. Two miles off its northern tip, Harbour Island is a different proposition entirely: a three-mile beach of genuinely pink sand, a village of New England-style clapboard houses at Dunmore Town, golf carts instead of cars, and small, expensive, very good hotels. Fly into North Eleuthera and take the five-minute water taxi.
- Harbour Island Guild guide
- Governor’s Harbour
The Abacos, Andros, Bimini & the southern islands
Beyond the five islands above, the country keeps going. The Abacos are the sailing capital of the Bahamas — a sheltered sound, a string of settled cays with candy-coloured cottages at Hope Town and New Plymouth, and a charter fleet based at Marsh Harbour and Treasure Cay; Dorian landed here in 2019 and the rebuilding is still visible. Andros is the largest island in the country and the least developed, fringed by the third-longest barrier reef in the world and riddled with blue holes; it is where serious bonefishing and serious diving happen. Bimini lies fifty miles off Miami and is a fishing and day-trip island. Further south, Long Island, Cat Island and San Salvador are for travellers who genuinely want nobody else on the beach.
Getting there, and getting between the islands
Arriving is easy. Moving between islands is the part people underestimate, and it is almost never a short hop by road.
Nassau is the front door, and it preclears
Lynden Pindling International (NAS) at Nassau takes the great majority of arrivals, with flights from Miami and Fort Lauderdale in under an hour and non-stops from most large eastern and midwestern US cities, Toronto and London. The detail worth knowing: Nassau and Freeport both offer US preclearance, so you clear United States immigration before boarding and land back in the States as a domestic arrival. It is a real convenience if you are connecting, and it means being at the airport a good three hours before a US departure. Airport taxi fares are set by zone rather than metered — roughly $25 to Cable Beach and $38 to Paradise Island for two people, plus the bridge toll — so agree the fare before you get in.
The Out Islands need a second flight
There are no roads between islands and no bridges except the two onto Paradise Island. To reach the Exumas, Eleuthera, the Abacos or Andros you take a second flight, usually a turboprop, either direct from Florida or connecting through Nassau. Bahamasair and Western Air run the scheduled routes, alongside a number of small charter operators; a Nassau hop is typically thirty to fifty minutes. Two habits will save you a bad day: leave a generous connection in Nassau, because the terminal for domestic departures is a walk and a separate check-in, and never book an Out Island flight that requires everything else to go right. Baggage allowances on the small aircraft are tighter than you expect.
Ferries and mail boats
Fast ferries run from Nassau to several islands — the useful ones for visitors are Harbour Island and Eleuthera, and Great Exuma — taking roughly two hours to Harbour Island and rather longer to the Exumas, with sailings on set days rather than daily. They are a genuinely pleasant way to travel when the schedule fits and a poor one when it does not, so check the timetable before you build a plan around it. The old mail boats still serve the smaller settlements out of Potter’s Cay in Nassau, carrying freight, passengers and the occasional car; they are cheap, slow, and an experience rather than a transport plan.
On the ground: taxis, jitneys, cars and carts
On New Providence, most visitors never hire a car. Taxis are zone-priced, the jitney minibuses run the main roads for a couple of dollars in exact change, and Nassau parking is genuinely unpleasant. On Grand Bahama and the larger Out Islands, hire something — a car on Grand Bahama and Great Exuma, a golf cart on Harbour Island where there are essentially no cars, and either on Eleuthera. Remember that you drive on the left, usually in a left-hand-drive car imported from Florida, which puts the driver on the kerb side and makes the first roundabout a genuine test. Take it slowly for the first day.
If you are arriving by cruise ship
Nassau is one of the busiest cruise ports in the world and can have four to six large ships alongside at once, which puts many thousands of people onto a few downtown streets between about ten and four. If that is your day, walk away from Bay Street rather than along it: the fort and the Queen’s Staircase are ten minutes uphill, and a short taxi ride reaches Cable Beach or Paradise Island, where several resorts sell a day pass. Our Nassau guide covers which parts of town are worth the walk and which are simply crowded.
The weather, the sea and the hurricane season
Warm all year, genuinely lovely from December to April, and honest about the months when the Atlantic is unpredictable.
Two seasons, not four
The dry season runs roughly December to April: afternoons around 24 to 27°C (75 to 81°F), low humidity, steady trade winds and very little rain. Evenings in January and February can be cooler than visitors expect — the high teens Celsius, sixties Fahrenheit — and a windy northern front can drop it further, so pack one long-sleeved layer. The wet season, May to November, brings afternoons of 29 to 32°C (84 to 90°F) with real humidity and short heavy downpours that usually clear within the hour. The rain rarely ruins a day; the humidity is what makes August hard work.
The sea, which is the point
Sea temperature runs from about 24°C (75°F) in February to 29°C (84°F) in August — swimmable every month of the year, though a February morning will feel brisk going in. Visibility on the banks is routinely 20 to 30 metres. Two practical notes: the trade winds blow hardest from December to March, which is glorious on a beach and can cancel a small-boat excursion, so build a spare day into any Exuma trip; and sargassum seaweed can wash up on Atlantic-facing shores in spring and summer, affecting east coasts more than the sheltered western ones.
Hurricane season, plainly
The Atlantic season runs 1 June to 30 November, with the real peak from mid-August to mid-October. The overwhelming majority of trips in those months are unaffected, and rates are at their lowest for good reason. But the risk is not theoretical: Hurricane Dorian in September 2019 sat over Abaco and Grand Bahama as a category five and did damage that is still visible today. So do three things rather than avoid the season. Buy insurance covering hurricane disruption at the time you book. Choose a hotel with a written rebooking policy. And keep September and early October plans flexible, watching the forecast in the week before you fly.
One honest note: within the country the weather varies less than the wind does, and an exposed cay can be uncomfortable on a day when Nassau is perfect. Our month-by-month guide to visiting the Bahamas goes through it properly, with sea temperatures, rainfall and the weeks to avoid on price.
Food, conch and Junkanoo
What to eat, what it will cost you, and the one thing worth rearranging a trip for.
Conch, in every form
Conch — pronounced “konk” — is the national food. Raw as conch salad, diced at a stand in front of you with onion, tomato, sweet pepper, lime and sour orange; battered and fried as cracked conch; or in fritters and chowder. The best is almost never in a hotel: it is at a shack at Potter’s Cay under the Paradise Island bridge, or at Arawak Cay, the row of fry shacks west of downtown Nassau that everyone calls the Fish Fry. Beyond conch, expect grouper and snapper, spiny lobster in season, peas and rice, johnnycake, and guava duff for pudding. Kalik and Sands are the local beers.
What eating out is really like
Two honest warnings. First, food is expensive, because almost all of it is imported: a sit-down main course in a resort restaurant of $35 to $50 is normal, and a supermarket basket will surprise anyone from the mainland. Eating at least one meal a day away from the hotel — a fry shack, a takeaway, a roadside stand — changes the economics of a week considerably. Second, on the smaller Out Islands the choice is limited and the kitchens close early; several of the best places take one sitting and need booking that morning, and on some cays there are two restaurants in total. Tipping runs to about fifteen per cent, and many bills already carry a service charge, so check before adding again.
Junkanoo, and the rest of the calendar
Junkanoo is the national festival and unlike anything else in the Caribbean: rival groups of hundreds of costumed dancers, cowbells, whistles and brass parade down Bay Street from about two in the morning until well after sunrise on Boxing Day and again on New Year’s Day, judged and fiercely competitive. Costumes take a year to build. If you are in Nassau on either date, do not sleep through it — buy a bleacher seat in advance or stand behind the barriers, and be in position by one in the morning. Smaller summer Junkanoo events run through the year, and the Exuma regattas in April bring the sailing sloops out.
What the Bahamas costs in 2026
This is not a budget destination, and Nassau in high season is the expensive end of it. Honest figures in US dollars, which is also the local rate.
What a bed costs
High season is roughly mid-December to mid-April and the difference is stark. A comfortable four-star double on Cable Beach or Paradise Island runs about $320 to $520 a night in season before the resort levy, falling to something like $190 to $300 in September and October. The big resorts sit above that and go a long way above it over Christmas. Grand Bahama is the value island at roughly $150 to $260. A small hotel in the Exumas is $250 to $420; Harbour Island is the dearest place in the country, with good small hotels at $400 to $800 and higher at Christmas. Always add ten per cent VAT and the daily levy before comparing.
What a day costs
Two people travelling comfortably — a good hotel with the levy paid, one casual meal and one proper dinner, a boat trip or an entry fee, and taxis rather than a hire car — should budget $450 to $650 a day for the couple in high season on New Providence, and rather less on Grand Bahama. Travelling more simply, in a small hotel or guesthouse, eating at fry shacks and beaches, brings that to $260 to $380. The single biggest lever is the season: the identical week in late September costs roughly two-thirds of what it costs in March.
Where the money goes, and what is free
Excursions are the line item people forget. A full-day boat trip in the Exumas taking in the sandbars, the pigs and a snorkel stop is commonly $200 to $350 a person; a half-day reef snorkel from Nassau $80 to $120; a resort day pass $100 to $200. Against that, the best thing in the country is free: every beach in the Bahamas is public up to the high-water mark, including the ones in front of the big resorts. Cabbage Beach, Gold Rock Beach in Lucayan National Park, the pink sand at Harbour Island and the ocean side of almost any Out Island cost nothing at all.
Bahamas travel FAQ
How many days do you need in the Bahamas?
Seven nights is the sweet spot, and it is enough for two islands rather than one. A shape that works well is three nights on New Providence for Nassau, Cable Beach and Paradise Island, then four on one Out Island — the Exumas for water, Harbour Island for the pink sand and the small-hotel atmosphere, Grand Bahama for the easiest logistics. A long weekend is perfectly viable if you stay on New Providence and do not try to island-hop; the airport is twenty minutes from Cable Beach and there is a great deal of beach within that radius. What does not work is trying to see four islands in a week. Every hop means a small aircraft or a ferry, a check-in, and half a day gone.
Which Bahamian island should I choose?
Ask what you want the days to look like. New Providence (Nassau, Cable Beach, Paradise Island) has the flights, the big resorts, the restaurants and the only real nightlife — choose it for convenience and choice, not for solitude. Grand Bahama is quieter and much cheaper, with long empty beaches at Lucaya. The Exumas are about the water: 365 cays, sandbars that appear at low tide, and the clearest sea in the country. Harbour Island, off Eleuthera, is three miles of pale pink sand, golf carts instead of cars, and small expensive hotels. The Abacos are for sailors. If it is your first visit and you have a week, pair New Providence with one of the others.
What currency do the Bahamas use, and should I bring Bahamian dollars?
The Bahamian dollar (B$) is fixed at parity with the US dollar — one to one, and it has been since 1966. American notes circulate freely alongside Bahamian ones and you will often be given change in a mixture of the two. There is no need to change money before you travel and no reason to seek out Bahamian dollars at all. Cards work in hotels, restaurants and larger shops; carry some small US notes for taxis, tips, straw-market stalls and the conch stands, and note that on the smaller Out Islands cash is still king and the single ATM can be empty. VAT of ten per cent applies to most bills, and most resorts add a compulsory resort levy on top of the room rate — always ask for the total with taxes and fees included.
When is the best time to visit the Bahamas?
Mid-December to mid-April is the dry, bright, breezy season, with afternoons around 24 to 27°C, low humidity and almost no rain — and the highest rates of the year, particularly over Christmas, New Year and the American spring break in March. Late April, May and early June are the value sweet spot: the weather is still reliably good, the sea has warmed up, and rates drop noticeably once the spring-break crowd goes home. July to October is hot, humid and much cheaper, with afternoon downpours that clear quickly — and it is also hurricane season. Our month-by-month guide goes through it properly.
How risky is hurricane season, and what should I do about it?
The Atlantic hurricane season runs from 1 June to 30 November, and the genuine peak for the Bahamas is mid-August to mid-October. Most trips in those months are completely unaffected — but the risk is real and the islands have been hit hard within living memory. Three sensible precautions: buy travel insurance that covers hurricane disruption and buy it when you book, not later; choose a hotel with a published hurricane policy that lets you rebook; and if you are travelling in September or early October, keep the plan flexible and watch the forecast in the week before you fly. Nothing about the season should stop you going — it should change how you book.
Do you drive on the left in the Bahamas, and do I need a car?
You drive on the left — a British legacy — while most cars on the road are left-hand-drive imports from the United States, so the driver sits on the kerb side. It is a genuinely disorientating combination for a day or so, and roundabouts are where visitors go wrong. On New Providence most people skip the car: taxi fares are set by zone, jitney buses run the main roads for a couple of dollars, and Nassau parking is unpleasant. On Grand Bahama and the larger Out Islands a car or a golf cart is worth having. On Harbour Island there are essentially no cars at all — everyone uses golf carts, and you should book one with your room.
Ready to plan your Bahamas trip?
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