Alcatraz is sold out? This is how to get Alcatraz Island Tickets!
Alcatraz Island is the most popular ticketed attraction in San Francisco and welcomes nearly 5,000 people every day. Pretty ironic for a place that people used to try to escape from!
Unfortunately for many visitors, it is so popular that Alcatraz Island tickets sell out for much of the year. If you are looking for Alcatraz Island tours and can’t find tickets for them, you can find some answers here! There are three ways to get to the island:
Get a ticket through Alcatraz City Cruises well in advance.
Refresh the Alcatraz City Cruises website if your day is sold out.
Get an Alcatraz City Cruises ticket packaged with a San Francisco tour.
Find an Alcatraz City Cruises ticket on a third-party website.
Do you notice the theme? The only company that runs and Alcatraz ferry service is Alcatraz City Cruises. They are the only way to get on the island and in the prison. So if you want to visit Alcatraz, the best thing to do is to book well in advance directly through the ferry company. You can book up to 90 days in advance here.
Any other website that claims to have Alcatraz Island tickets or offer Alcatraz Island tours is either packaging an Alcatraz City Cruises ticket with something else, adding a surcharge on top of an Alcatraz City Cruises ticket, selling a boat trip around Alcatraz that does not dock, or maybe just lying.
As of early 2022, the price of an adult Alcatraz Island ticket is $41. Anything that costs more than that is marked up or packaged with another tour product.
If you didn’t book in advance and there are no tickets available for the Alcatraz ferry on the day you want to visit, you can try refreshing the page at regular intervals. When tourists cancel their trips or big groups don’t use all the Alcatraz Island tickets they ordered, Alcatraz City Cruises puts the tickets right back on their website.
If you don’t want to stare at your phone all day, book a San Francisco tour and Alcatraz ticket package. Alcatraz City Cruises partners with dozens of companies, like Fogcutter Tours, that order a limited number of tickets to sell along with their regular tour products. Want to tour San Francisco in addition to doing an Alcatraz Island tour? This is the best option.
If you book my small-group city tour, you get picked up at your hotel, spend the morning visiting the Golden Gate Bridge, Twin Peaks, Haight-Ashbury, Mission, Castro, and more, drive down San Francisco’s crookedest street, grab lunch at the best sandwich spot in town and get dropped off right at the Alcatraz ferry landing at Pier 33. Your Alcatraz City Cruises ferry ticket will be waiting for you and you can spend your afternoon on the island and in the prison! Learn more or book that experience right here.
If my experience is sold out or doesn’t fit your style, I can personally recommend Dylan’s Tours’ 1 Day Alcatraz Tour, which spends less time in San Francisco but includes Sausalito and Muir Woods. I can also recommend Bay Voyager’s Touch of Gold and Alcatraz Combo, which is the absolute best boat tour of San Francisco bay. A third excellent option is Vantigo’s City Tour and Alcatraz Combo which does a cool city tour in rad, lovingly restored VW buses.
Companies like ours that partner with City Cruises must follow strict rules:
We can only order a limited number of tickets.
We cannot sell the Alcatraz ticket by itself.
We cannot mark up our tour price along with the Alcatraz ticket.
We must finalize our ticket requests ten days in advance and include the names of every passenger.
We don’t give tours on Alcatraz.
This prevents tour companies from ordering all the Alcatraz tickets and just scalping them. If a tour company or website is not playing by the above rules, then something fishy is going on…
…Speaking of fishy, Alcatraz City Cruises does not offer refunds on their tickets, so sometimes tourists that have to cancel their trips will sell their Alcatraz Island tickets on Craigslist, StubHub, etc. These websites are an option for finding tickets, but it’s hard to tell what is a legit ticket. Other websites with official sounding URLs and top ad placement on Google are just selling you a City Cruises ticket with a markup, if it’s a real ticket at all.
In summary, the Alcatraz Island tour is amazing and to make sure you can visit this spectacular island, book up to 90 days in advance. If you can’t or didn’t book in advance and Alcatraz Cruises is sold out, book a ticket package with a reputable partner company like Fogcutter Tours.
