1000 Islands Dinner Cruise: Prices and Real Options

Prices and what's included

All prices below are CAD, quoted before HST and a per-person fuel surcharge of $1.75 to $2.75 that gets added at checkout.

Last verified: August 2026.

Schedule and boarding

Departure is 6:30 PM through most of the summer, moving to 5:30 PM from August 19 onward to keep the sunset inside the three-hour sailing. The cruise runs daily through the peak summer weeks and drops to Friday through Sunday in spring and fall, which matters more than it sounds: booking a Tuesday evening in late September only to find the dinner boat isn't sailing that night is one of the more common planning mistakes we've seen. Tickets are picked up at the Kingston office on Ontario Street, and boarding happens at Crawford Wharf; arriving 30 minutes ahead is the standard advice, the same as the daytime sightseeing cruises.

The meal and the boat

Dinner is a three-course, table-service meal served while the boat moves through the Kingston harbor and the nearer islands of the Admiralty group, a different cluster of islands from the ones the Gananoque and Ivy Lea daytime sailings pass. Most sailings use the Island Star, whose glass-topped upper deck keeps the view open through the meal; on select nights the Island Queen substitutes in. Neither boat's route reaches Boldt Castle, which sits roughly 60 kilometers east near Gananoque, well outside a three-hour Kingston sailing.

The meal itself runs on the boat's own schedule rather than a table reservation you can push earlier or later; seating happens shortly after boarding at Crawford Wharf, and the three courses are timed to finish before the boat turns back toward the harbor near the end of the sailing. Travelers who want a slower, drawn-out dinner experience should expect the pacing of a scheduled cruise, not a restaurant, since the boat keeps moving on its own clock regardless of how quickly or slowly the table finishes each course.

Cancellation, plainly

Kingston dinner tickets are sold as final-sale unless Ticket Assurance is added at the time of booking. That's a real difference from the daytime sightseeing cruises we compare on this site, which carry free cancellation up to 24 hours before departure. Add the protection if the evening's plans are anything less than certain; without it, a missed sailing is simply lost.

The practical reason this matters more for a dinner cruise than a sightseeing loop is the price gap. Losing a $29 daytime ticket to a change of plans stings less than losing a $124 dinner ticket booked for four people, and the daytime cruises' built-in 24-hour cancellation window means that risk mostly doesn't exist there in the first place. Weigh the extra cost of Ticket Assurance against how firm the evening's plans actually are before deciding to skip it.

The two trips answer different questions, and neither is a compromise for the other. Booking an evening built around a table-service dinner and a sunset, the Kingston cruise at CAD $124 is the only option that delivers it, final-sale terms included. Booking a trip built around the castles and a lower price, the daytime sailings from $29 do that better, and they leave the passport question, not the dinner reservation, as the thing to plan around.

Whichever one fits the itinerary, the two departure points, Kingston for dinner and Gananoque or Ivy Lea for the castles, sit close enough together on the map that neither rules out the other on a longer visit; the planning question is really about which evening the trip has room for, not which cruise is objectively better. Book the evening before you book the table: departure times shift with the season, and the dining boats sail fewer nights outside July and August.