Bruny Island Tour

A Bruny Island tour from Hobart is a full day: an early pickup, a drive of about 35 minutes to the ferry at Kettering, the crossing to the island, and about 10 hours out in all. The walking day from Hobart is Tassie Tours Tasmania’s From Hobart: Full-Day Bruny Island Tour with Guide, from US$127 a person (checked November 2026), with hotel pickup, the return ferry and the national parks pass included; lunch and the tastings are paid for on the day.

The short answer

Bruny Island is two islands joined by The Neck, a sandy isthmus, south of Hobart across the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. Every day tour from Hobart crosses on the car ferry from Kettering to Roberts Point and covers the same ground in a different order: The Neck and Truganini Lookout, Adventure Bay, the beaches and rainforest of South Bruny, the food producers, and on some tours Cape Bruny Lighthouse. What separates them is what the price includes. Tassie Tours Tasmania’s day is the walking day, with 957 reviews (checked November 2026) and food at your own cost; Bruny Island Safaris’ day is the one with a guided tour inside the lighthouse and the meals paid for; Pennicott’s days add a 3-hour cruise or a full tasting menu.

Check dates for the day tour

Walks, the lighthouse, the cruise or the food: pick your kind of day

Prices, ratings and review counts from the listings (GetYourGuide checked November 2026). Operators price by date and season, so treat the figures as the shape of the market, not a quote.

Where everything is

The ferry leaves from Kettering, at 79 Ferry Road, 33 km by road south of Hobart, and lands 20 minutes later at Roberts Point on North Bruny. From there the main road runs south through Great Bay, where Get Shucked and Bruny Island Cheese Co. sit beside it, crosses The Neck, and reaches South Bruny: Adventure Bay on the east coast, where the cruises leave, Alonnah and Lunawanna on the west, and Cape Bruny Lighthouse at the end of Lighthouse Road in the south-west. The Parks and Wildlife Service puts the lighthouse 1 hour 15 minutes from the ferry. Discover Tasmania, the state’s tourism site, gives the island about 362 sq km and more than 50 km from north to south.

Tassie Tours Tasmania’s day, step by step

The day starts with a pickup from a hotel in the Hobart CBD; the operator confirms the time and place after booking. The van drives south to Kettering and crosses on the ferry, which is included. The morning is the active part: easy to moderate walks to beaches, lagoons and temperate rainforest, scenic lookouts, the viewing platform at The Neck, and the spots where the guides look for the island’s white wallabies; swimming is optional when the weather allows. Lunch is at Hotel Bruny, at your own cost, with options for most budgets and diets. The afternoon slows down for tastings, honey, fudge, drinks and oysters among them, also at your own cost, before the ferry back. The guide sets the order of stops by the weather and the group, and not every stop fits into one day, so read the list as what the day can include, not a fixed schedule.

What it costs, and what the price buys

The walking day is one of the lower-priced full days from Hobart: from US$127 a person, against US$197 for Bruny Island Safaris’ day with the lighthouse and meals, and US$204 for Pennicott’s cruise day (checked November 2026). On their own sites the operators price these days in Australian dollars: Tassie Tours Tasmania’s Bruny Island day tour from A$180, Bruny Island Safaris’ food, sightseeing and lighthouse day A$280, and Pennicott’s full day with the cruise A$290 an adult (November 2026). The same Tassie Tours day is also sold on Viator, from US$128 (checked November 2026), with 4.8 from 1,489 reviews there: see the Tassie Tours day on Viator.

Driving yourself costs less in cash and more in planning. A visitor car is A$58.60 return on the ferry until 30 November 2026 and A$67.30 from 1 December to April, with the driver and passengers included (Island Connections Bruny Island, November 2026). South Bruny National Park, which takes in the lighthouse, needs a parks pass: A$49.15 a day per vehicle (Parks and Wildlife Service, November 2026). A tour inside the lighthouse is A$25 a person on top. Add the car, the fuel, the queue at Kettering on a busy day and the unsealed road to the lighthouse.

The ferry page has the fares and the timetable if you drive, and Bruny Island in a day compares a tour with driving yourself.

See dates and the live price

The lighthouse, the cruise and the food

Cape Bruny Lighthouse stands on the south-west tip of the island in South Bruny National Park. Built in 1836 and first lit in 1838, its tower is 13 m tall, but on the cliffs it stands 114 m above the sea, and it is the only lighthouse in southern Tasmania open for tours (Parks and Wildlife Service). Only Bruny Island Safaris runs guided tours inside it: its day from Hobart includes one, and visitors who drive can book its 30-minute tour at the lighthouse, from US$18 (checked November 2026). Cape Bruny Lighthouse has the details.

The wilderness cruise is a separate product run by Pennicott Wilderness Journeys from Adventure Bay: 3 hours along the sea cliffs of South Bruny, into sea caves and out to the Friars, where fur seals haul out. It is sold on its own from Adventure Bay, from US$134 (checked November 2026), or as a day from Hobart. The cruise page compares the two. The island’s oysters, cheese, honey and chocolate are sold at the producers’ own shops; the food page lists them with the tours that stop at each.

What was disrupted, and when to go

When this page was checked on 3 November 2026, the Parks and Wildlife Service’s alerts listed nothing on Bruny Island beyond the seasonal campfire ban on reserved land, in force since 26 October 2026, and the ferry operator’s status page said its services were running as scheduled. Before that, a breakdown of the ferry MV Bowen in March 2026 left a single vessel shuttling across for three days; the Parks and Wildlife Service closed The Neck lookout, its car park, toilets and boardwalk for maintenance from 11 June 2026, and listed no closure there in November; and at the end of October 2025 a bushfire on the Labillardiere Peninsula closed Lighthouse Road for two days. Bird flu (H5) has been found in Tasmania’s wild birds since August 2026, when the first case was confirmed near Rocky Cape in the north-west: the state’s Department of Natural Resources and Environment asks visitors not to touch sick or dead birds or animals.

The ferry runs 365 days a year, the cruise every day but Christmas Day, and the day tours all year. Summer adds the most: from 1 December the cruise sails at 10 am and 1:30 pm as well as 11 am, the lighthouse tours run from 9:30 am to 4 pm from October to March, and the ferry’s peak fare applies from December to April. The little penguins and shearwaters at The Neck are best seen at dusk from September to February (Discover Tasmania). The island is often cooler than Hobart, so pack warm layers and a rain jacket in any month.

Longer trips from Hobart

Tassie Tours Tasmania also sells its Bruny day inside a 2-day package with Port Arthur and a 3-day package that adds a day of Hobart’s sights; the Bruny ferry is included in both; the 2-day listing excludes accommodation, and the 3-day is three day tours from Hobart. The 5- and 7-day small-group circuits of Tasmania from Hobart, carded below, go west to Strahan and Cradle Mountain and east to the Bay of Fires and Freycinet, but neither visits Bruny Island: they suit a first trip round the state, with Bruny added as a day from Hobart before or after.

The Nuenonne people called the island Lunnawannalonna, a name kept in the two South Bruny settlements, Alonnah and Lunawanna (Parks and Wildlife Service). A memorial to the Nuenonne woman Truganini stands at The Neck; The Neck has her story and the lookout named after her.