Travel in Bermuda: two gateways and no hire cars

How visitors arrive in Bermuda

There are two ways in, and they lead to different holidays. In 2024, by the Wikipedia figures, about 535,000 visitors came by cruise ship and about 140,000 by air. Air visitors were a fifth of arrivals and spent 78% of the money, because they stay ashore for days and fill the hotels.

The airport is L.F. Wade International, on St David's Island at the eastern end, built on the former US Naval Air Station and joined to the main island by a causeway through Hamilton Parish. Scheduled flights by land-based aircraft began in 1948, at what was then Kindley Field. The Bermuda Tourism Authority's report for 2025 names the routes that matter: New York, with Newark flying all year to offset reduced JFK capacity, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington, together with Canada, where dedicated flights lifted arrivals 26% to about 20,000. In the first half of 2026, 9,884 visitors flew in from the United Kingdom and 11,896 from Canada.

Cruise ships mostly berth at King's Wharf in the Dockyard, at the opposite end, where they land regularly in the summer months. Hamilton and St George's are the other two marine ports. In 2025 the cruise sector shrank as planned, with fewer early calls, construction at King's Wharf in the fourth quarter and 22 cancellations, mostly for weather; in the first half of 2026, 235,179 visitors arrived by cruise ship, 11.5% more than a year earlier.

How visitors cross the islands without a car

Non-residents have traditionally been prohibited from driving cars in Bermuda. Visitors use public buses and the SeaExpress ferries, both run by the Ministry of Tourism and Transport, take taxis, or rent scooters and, more recently, small cars. Traffic drives on the left. The islands have 447 kilometres of paved road, 225 kilometres of it public and 222 kilometres private, and the old railway, opened in 1931 and abandoned in 1948, survives as the Bermuda Railway Trail for walkers. Motor cars were themselves legalised only in 1948.

The water is the old road. For three centuries most travel in Bermuda went by boat, and the narrow tribe roads were laid out mainly to give each lot a way down to the shore. For the Cup Match in 2026 the tourism authority named an official taxi provider, booked through an app at regulated fares, for the trip to Somerset Cricket Club.

What the East End holds

St George's, founded in 1612 and the capital until 1815, is the core of the UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 2000 as the Historic Town of St George and Related Fortifications. UNESCO records that about 65% of the buildings in the town predate 1900 and about 40% of those predate 1800, and that 176 buildings in the inscribed area are listed. The layout grew around King's Square on the harbour, with Water Street along the quays, York Street to the north and narrow lanes beyond.

The square holds the Bermuda National Trust Museum, and excavations there found the foundations of the governor's house of 1612. Seventeenth-century re-enactments are staged through the year, the tourism authority mentions the ducking stool among them. The State House of 1620, the first stone building other than the forts and built to house the Parliament, stands nearby, along with St Peter's Church, the Unfinished Church, the Old Rectory, Tucker House and the Mitchell House with its historical society museum and printshop. The old Globe Hotel, a centre of Confederate intrigue during the American Civil War, is preserved as a museum.

Ordnance Island in the harbour carries a statue of Sir George Somers by Desmond Fountain. The replica of Deliverance that stood there from the 1960s is described as still in place in the Wikipedia article on St George's, but the article on Sea Venture records that it was judged unsafe and demolished in 2022.

The forts ring the eastern islands. Fort St Catherine on the northeastern tip can be visited for a fee and was restored with new exhibits after a management plan of 2009; the Martello Tower in Ferry Reach, St David's Battery, Fort George and Alexandra Battery have also been restored. Castle Island, with forts dating from 1621, is closed to the public as a refuge for the Bermuda skink and the cahow. Tobacco Bay, below the town, is where the stolen gunpowder of 1775 was loaded into boats.

What the West End holds

The Royal Naval Dockyard on Ireland Island was begun in 1811 and served the Royal Navy until 1957, with a small station until 1995. It fell into disrepair, and from the 1980s, under the West End Development Corporation formed in 1982, it was renovated for visitors. The Wikipedia article on Bermuda calls it the islands' most visited attraction. The Keep, including the Commissioner's House, houses the National Museum of Bermuda, which incorporates the old Maritime Museum; Earth magazine singles out its exhibit on shipwrecks, with coins, jewellery, weapons and instruments for finding a ship's position recovered from the reefs.

Between the Dockyard and the main island, Somerset Bridge is a drawbridge with an opening of just 32 inches. Somerset Village is one of two informal villages on the islands, and Somerset Long Bay, with calm, shallow water, sits at the western end.

What Hamilton offers between the two ends

Hamilton, founded in 1790 and the capital since 1815, sits in the middle of the chain on its own harbour, and the City of Hamilton takes its name from Henry Hamilton, a governor of Bermuda. Its central monument is the Cenotaph in front of the Cabinet Building, raised for the dead of the First World War and the site of the Remembrance Day ceremony each November. Overlooking the harbour in Barr's Bay Park stands the sculpture We Arrive, unveiled in 2010 for the enslaved people freed in 1835 from the American brig Enterprise. A statue commemorates Johnny Barnes, a retired bus driver who stood by the road into the city for years greeting commuters on their way to work.

The Hamilton Princess Hotel served in the Second World War as a censorship centre, where about 1,200 staff read transatlantic mail and radio traffic. The Bermuda Day parade comes through the city in late May, and the Gombey troupes need a permit to perform in its streets. Around it the Wikipedia account lists the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum and Zoo, the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute, the Botanical Gardens, where the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art has had its own building since 2008, and Gibbs Hill Lighthouse. The Botanical Gardens, established in 1898, now cover 38 acres.

Where the beaches and reefs are

The beaches are mostly on the south shore, where many of the hotels also stand, and the sand there is pink. Britannica attributes the colour to pulverised coral and shells; Earth magazine to red-shelled foraminifera that live on the reefs. Horseshoe Bay and Warwick Long Bay are the two the Wikipedia account names. Much of the remaining coastline is rocky, with tide pools.

Under the water, divers find wrecks and reefs in relatively shallow water, typically 9 to 12 metres deep, and reefs within reach of snorkellers from the shore, especially at Church Bay. Earth magazine puts the number of wrecks around Bermuda at about 300, with the older ones best seen at the western end and modern ships, an ocean liner among them, to the east. The paddle steamer Montana, wrecked during the American Civil War while refuelling for a run through the Union blockade, lies in a few metres of water within reach of a snorkel; the Cristóbal Colón and the iron sailing ship North Carolina need scuba equipment, and dives are booked through local dive shops.

The limestone underneath is full of caves. Crystal Caves in Hamilton Parish, close to the airport, has stalactites, underground saltwater pools and floating walkways. Next to it, Blue Hole Park has two linked caves flooded with less than a metre of water that can be entered on foot. Earth magazine also counts nine golf courses on the islands' 53 km², six of them private but open to visitors.

When the seasons suit a visit

The sea and the hurricanes set the calendar. The water around Bermuda averages 18.6 °C in February and 28.2 °C in August, and Britannica gives an average August daytime high of 30 °C. Bermuda Day, in late May, is traditionally the first day residents go into the sea. The hurricane season runs from June to November, and storms do not need to land to affect travel: the tourism authority attributed part of the fall in air arrivals in 2025 to cancellations from August to early November during unusually high storm activity, even when systems did not make landfall.

The season has moved over time. Victorian visitors came to escape North American winters, and by 1937, when flying boats began scheduled services, summer had become the more important season for shorter stays. The tourism authority now aims to raise visitor numbers outside the summer months. Hotel occupancy in the second quarter of 2026 was 76.2%, against 61.4% across the first half of the year as a whole.

The calendar of events draws its own crowds. Cup Match fills the Thursday and Friday before the first Monday in August, and the tourism authority's list for 2026 included SailGP, a PGA Tour event and the Newport Bermuda Yacht Race. The 2024 Butterfield Bermuda Championship, a PGA Tour event, generated an estimated $14.1 million in direct spending, by the authority's own analysis. During Cup Match the authority runs a visitors' camp beside the field at Somerset Cricket Club, free to enter for those who show a hotel room key, a foreign driving licence or a cruise card, with tickets for the match itself sold at the club or online.

Where visitors stay

Accommodation is tighter than it was. Hotel stock in 2025 remained well below 2019 levels, the tourism authority reported, mainly because the Fairmont Southampton, the islands' largest resort, stayed closed; it was scheduled to reopen in the second half of 2026. Smaller openings filled some of the gap, among them the 14-room Hillcrest Boutique Hotel in the East End in 2025, and Grotto Bay Beach Resort planned 24 more rooms for the summer of 2026. Average daily rates rose 10.1% in 2025 while occupancy stayed broadly flat.

In the second quarter of 2026, 68% of air visitors stayed in a hotel or guesthouse, 14% with friends or relatives and 11% in a rented home or apartment. The rest of the arrivals, the cruise passengers, sleep aboard their ships at King's Wharf.

Entry rules and travel advice change too often for a reference page and are not given here. The country's figures, its currency and its plug types sit in the record beside this article, and the background to what visitors see is in the history of Bermuda and its culture.