Almost. There is exactly one passenger ferry between two Hawaiian islands, and it is a short crossing between Maui and Lānaʻi. Every other island pair is a flight.
That single answer is worth more than it looks, because the number of trips built around a ferry that does not exist is high enough that both Molokaʻi and Oʻahu pages on this site had to be written partly to undo it.
The one ferry that exists
Expeditions runs the Maui to Lānaʻi crossing and has for about three decades. It is a passenger ferry, not a car ferry, and a regulated public utility rather than a tour boat. A state commission sets its fares, not the market.
| Direction | Departures |
|---|---|
| Māʻalaea, Maui to Mānele, Lānaʻi | 6:30am, 11:00am, 3:30pm |
| Mānele, Lānaʻi to Māʻalaea, Maui | 8:30am, 1:00pm, 5:30pm |
The crossing takes about an hour and ten minutes across the ʻAuʻau Channel. Online booking closes 30 minutes before departure, after which it is a phone call. Child fares cover ages 2 to 11, under 2 travels as an infant, and the resident senior rate starts at 65.
In winter the channel is one of the better whale-watching platforms in the state and costs a fraction of a whale-watch ticket, which is a real reason to take the 11:00am over the 6:30am.
It does not leave from Lahaina any more
This is the part that matters, because most pages describing this ferry are out of date, and until today two pages on this site were among them.
The ferry sailed from Lahaina Harbor until August 2023. The fire destroyed the harbor along with most of the town, and Expeditions moved operations to Māʻalaea. The Public Utilities Commission's own order records the change in operations to Māʻalaea Harbor as one of the reasons it granted the company a rate increase.
Two practical consequences. Māʻalaea is on the other side of the isthmus from Lahaina, so if you are staying in Kāʻanapali or Kapalua the drive to the harbor is now the long way around instead of five minutes down the road. And the crossing itself got longer, because Māʻalaea is farther from Lānaʻi than Lahaina was. The operator now puts it at about an hour and ten minutes.
Getting to the harbor
Māʻalaea sits at the waist of the island, which is good news if you are staying in Kīhei and bad news if you are on the west side. These are our own measured figures, free-flow with no traffic in them, so treat the west-side numbers as the optimistic version of a road that backs up.
| From | To Māʻalaea Harbor |
|---|---|
| Kīhei | 16 min |
| Kahului Airport (OGG) | 19 min |
| Wailea | 29 min |
| Lahaina | 29 min |
| Kāʻanapali | 37 min |
| Kapalua | 47 min |
For the 6:30am departure from Kapalua that is a 5:15am start once you allow for parking and the boarding cutoff, which is the sort of thing that turns a good idea into a bad morning. From Kīhei or Wailea the early boat is genuinely easy.
Two of these legs, Kīhei and Wailea, are ones where our two routing engines disagreed by more than a quarter, and as always we publish the slower. On that stretch of the South Kīhei road the real drive is probably nearer the faster figure.
What it costs
The ferry is a regulated utility, so its fares are a matter of public record, not something you have to guess at. On September 16 2024 the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission granted Expeditions a rate increase in Docket No. 2023-0204, effective October 5 2024. It was the company's first increase in over sixteen years.
The commission's order set child and resident senior fares at $15, up from $10, and adult fares in a band between $40 and $66 depending on rate category. Baggage fees changed modestly at the same time. Which adult figure applies to you depends on the category you book, so take the exact number from the operator, not from here.
Compared with flying to Lānaʻi, the ferry is cheaper, runs more often, and lands you at Mānele next to Hulopoʻe Bay rather than at the airport in the middle of the island.
The ferries that do not exist
Three routes get searched for constantly and none of them run.
- Maui to Molokaʻi. The Molokaʻi Ferry between Lahaina and Kaunakakai stopped in 2016 and nothing replaced it. Molokaʻi is a flight, and essentially only from Honolulu.
- Oʻahu to Maui or Kauaʻi. The Hawaii Superferry ran Honolulu to Kahului from 2007. In March 2009 the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that the special law letting it operate without a completed environmental impact statement was unconstitutional, the last sailing was March 19 2009, and the company went bankrupt. Nothing has been tried since.
- Any car ferry, anywhere. There has never been an ongoing one between the main islands and there is not one now. Island hopping means a separate rental on each island, returned before your flight and collected after the next one.
If a page tells you to drive your rental car onto a boat, it is describing either the Superferry or somewhere that is not Hawaii.
Using it as a day trip
Maui to Lānaʻi is the one island pair in Hawaii that works as a day rather than as a move, and the ferry is why. Take the 6:30am or the 11:00am out, come back on the 5:30pm, and you get a real day on an island you can see meaningfully without a car. Hulopoʻe Bay is a five-minute walk from the Mānele dock.
Two things to plan around. Lānaʻi has almost no rental cars and the interior roads are 4×4 only, so anything beyond Hulopoʻe and Lānaʻi City needs a booked tour or a shuttle. And the last boat back is the last boat back, which is a different kind of deadline than a flight where there is another one in two hours.
The comparison with Molokaʻi is worth reading if you are choosing between the two small islands, because the ferry makes them completely different propositions.
Where this came from
Schedule, crossing time, harbors and fare categories read from the operator's own site and booking system on August 18 2026. Fares, the effective date and the harbor change read from Expeditions' press release on the Public Utilities Commission order in Docket No. 2023-0204. Superferry dates from contemporaneous reporting of the March 2009 Hawaii Supreme Court ruling.
Ferry schedules move. Confirm the departure you are planning around with the operator before you build a day on it, and if anything here has gone out of date, tell us and it gets rechecked and re-dated rather than quietly edited.
