Speedboat or yacht in Dubai: all 16 tours compared, from $20

Take the speedboat first. Every speedboat listing on this site describes the same sensation in almost the same words: thrilling, at speed, high-speed thrills, cutting through the waves. $20 puts it most honestly — you bump and whip across the water. Two of the eight run on RIB boats, rigid inflatables with a hard hull and inflated sides, which sit low and turn hard. The boat stops for photographs, the guide talks between the runs, and then the throttle goes down again. You are outside for the whole of it, in the wind, and the spray comes over the bow.

Now the yacht. The yacht listings describe an entirely different activity: relax on the spacious upper deck and air-conditioned lower deck, sit back in VIP comfort, lay on the sunbeds, connect your own music. $25 serves breakfast in the morning or a BBQ at sunset. $126 has a live DJ, a swim stop and a drink station. $150 tells you outright not to forget your swimwear. The boat moves at walking pace by comparison, you can put a glass down without watching it, and nobody arrives back wet unless they chose to swim.

That is the honest centre of the speedboat or yacht in Dubai decision, and it explains the second difference, which is time. The speedboats run 30 to 100 minutes. The yachts and private cruises run one to eight hours, and the three-hour bookings are the ones people actually take. A speedboat is something you slot into an afternoon. A yacht is the afternoon.

Both see the same landmarks, and this surprises people. Dubai Marina, JBR, Ain Dubai on Bluewaters, Palm Jumeirah, Atlantis The Palm and Burj Al Arab appear in the listings for both kinds of boat. The speedboat gets to all of them faster and stops for photographs. The yacht gets to most of them slowly and lets you look for longer. Nobody on either boat misses the skyline.

One last thing before the table. Nobody has to pick a side for ever. A speedboat or yacht in Dubai costs less than most restaurant meals at the lower end of each list, and a good number of visitors do one of each on different days.

Take the speedboat if your day is already full. This is the commonest case. You have a dinner booking, a checkout time, a family splitting up for the afternoon. $40 is ninety minutes from the Marina out along the coast to Jumeirah Beach, past Dubai Eye, Palm Jumeirah and Burj Al Arab, with stops for photographs and a guide naming what you are looking at. You can be back and changed inside three hours of leaving your hotel.

Take the speedboat if the ride itself is the point. Some people want the landmarks. Some people want the throttle. If it is the second, $43 is a hundred minutes with a captain and a hostess and a deliberately small passenger list, rated 4.9. And $149 goes further than any of them: you drive your own SeaKart with an instructor leading on a separate boat, in thirty, sixty, ninety or one hundred and twenty minute options, with a swim stop in the Palm Lagoon on some of them. It is the most expensive speedboat ticket here and the only one where you are steering.

Take the yacht if you are a group that wants to sit together. A speedboat seats you in a row facing forward and the engine makes conversation hard work. A yacht has a deck. $25 is the one to start with: one to three hours from the Marina past Burj Al Arab, with breakfast in the morning or a BBQ at sunset, a tour guide, an upper deck and an air-conditioned lower deck, at $25. It carries 22,156 reviews at 4.7, more than any other tour on this site, and it is a shared boat, which is why the fare looks the way it does.

Take the yacht if you want to swim. Five of the eight yacht listings stop for a swim: $126 in Dubai Harbour, $270 in a lagoon, $150, $170 off the coast, and $196 on its longer options. No standard speedboat tour here does. That single line decides the speedboat or yacht in Dubai question for a lot of people in July.

Take the yacht if you are celebrating something. $153 is an hour on a private yacht at sunset with the sundeck to yourselves and your own music, rated 5.0 across 619 reviews — the only perfect rating on this site. $133 is a fifty-foot yacht with a local guide and a skipper. $270 is the largest booking we list, up to four hours privately from the Marina.