Broome dinosaur footprints tour: the boat trip to see them

This is the one Broome dinosaur footprints tour bookable on this site, and it reaches the footprints by water rather than by land or air. The cruise heads up Dampier Creek to a secluded beach, and the operator’s own description is specific about what is there: footprints preserved in the rock, dated at 120 million years old.

The trip is built as a relaxed afternoon rather than a fossil-hunting expedition. Sparkling wine and gourmet platters are served on board, and the cruise itself — up the creek, past the mangroves, out to the beach and back — is as much a part of the five hours as the footprints themselves.

At $137 it is one of the cheaper listings on this site, with 70 reviews at 4.8 — ahead of the whale-watching cruise on reviews, and behind only the snubfin dolphin cruise among the four boat trips out of Broome.

It is worth being clear about the vehicle, because the site’s name says helicopter and this tour is not one. Every dinosaur tour Broome currently sells is a cruise; there is no helicopter listing that lands at the footprints themselves.

Four boat trips run out of Broome on GetYourGuide, and the footprints cruise sits in the middle of the group on price. At $137 for five hours, it costs more than the snubfin dolphin cruise ($128, 4.5 hours, 79 reviews at 4.9) and the whale-watching and sunset cruise ($136, 4.5 hours, 65 reviews at 4.9), and less than the mud crab cruise ($185, six hours, 24 reviews at 4.9). Its own 70 reviews put it second of the four on review count, behind only the dolphin cruise.

The four trips cover different stretches of water and different things to look for. The footprints cruise runs up Dampier Creek to the secluded beach; the dolphin cruise works Roebuck Bay for snubfin dolphins, turtles and dugongs; the whale-watching cruise looks for humpback whales further out; and the mud crab trip goes into the mangrove creeks with the equipment to catch and cook your own crab. None of the four overlaps with what another one is built to show.

Rating-wise, all four sit between 4.8 and 4.9, which is close enough that price, length and what you actually want to see — footprints, dolphins, whales or mud crabs — matter more than the rating in choosing between them.

Broome’s helicopter listings fly over Cable Beach, Gantheaume Point, Roebuck Bay and, on the longer trips, the Kimberley coast further north. None of them land at the beach the prehistoric cruise reaches, and none currently offer an aerial view of the footprints themselves.

That is a straightforward gap between two different kinds of tour rather than an omission. The 30-minute flight over Cable Beach and Gantheaume Point, at $347, is the cheapest way to see this coastline from the air, and it covers ground the boat trip never reaches. The dinosaur footprints, on the current listings, belong to the cruise.

The two do pair well on the same trip, just not the same booking: the footprints cruise in the morning or afternoon, and a short helicopter flight on a different day for the aerial view of Cable Beach and the coast. Between the two, a visitor covers the water and the air without either tour claiming to do what it does not.

The Broome dinosaur footprints tour fits into a morning or an afternoon rather than an entire day, which is part of why it works well alongside a second Broome activity on the same visit. A sunset camel ride on Cable Beach, at $101 for one hour, is a common pairing for the same evening; the Malcolm Douglas Crocodile Park tour, at $59 for two and a half hours with transfers included, fits the other half of a day that starts on the water.

For a longer Broome stay, the footprints cruise is usually booked before the bigger Kimberley days rather than after: it is shorter, cheaper, and gives a first look at the coastline before committing to an 11-hour flight further out. Travellers building a full itinerary around Broome often put the cruise, a helicopter flight and one of the Kimberley days across three separate days rather than trying to combine any two of them into one.

None of that ordering is strictly required by the listings themselves — it is simply what spreads the cost and the time sensibly across a stay that already includes a boat trip, a helicopter flight and, for many visitors, at least one full day further into the Kimberley.