Are There Any Christmas Day Cruises Available In London?

Are there any Christmas Day cruises available in London? Yes. A small number of Thames boats sail on 25 December, when the Tube, buses and national rail are all shut down. Two bookable cruises dominate the day: a 3.5-hour lunch cruise from $232 per person, rated 4.5 from 47 reviews, and a 1-hour sightseeing cruise from $43 per person, rated 5 from 9 reviews. Uber Boat by Thames Clippers does not run at all on Christmas Day. Before you lock in a cruise, the honest breakdown of a London Christmas trip covers what's actually open that day and whether the crowds and cold are worth it.

Christmas Day is the strangest day of the London year. The city that normally never stops, stops. There is no Tube, no bus, no Elizabeth line, no DLR and no national rail anywhere in the country. The streets are close to empty, the Royal Parks are open and free, and a river that usually carries commuters and tourists carries almost nobody. Into that silence, a few boats venture out, and they are some of the only organised experiences actually running on the day itself.

The choice is narrower than at any other time of year, but it is a real choice. One operator runs a full lunch cruise, roughly three and a half hours on the water with a traditional Christmas meal served on board, departing from Westminster Pier. The same family of operators also runs a shorter sightseeing sailing, about an hour long, with multiple departures across the day. Beyond those, a couple of coach-and-cruise combinations add a guided tour of the empty capital before the boat leg. That is the full picture, and it is worth knowing before you plan the day, because almost every other attraction is closed.

For context on what else is open, closed and running on the day, the companion guide to Christmas Day openings and closures covers the whole city, from the parks to the museums to Chinatown's restaurants.

Are There Any Christmas Day Cruises Available In London?

Yes, two bookable Thames cruises run on 25 December 2026, which falls on a Friday. The Christmas Day Lunch Cruise runs 3.5 hours from $232 per person, with a 4.5 rating from 47 reviews. The Christmas Day Sightseeing Cruise runs about 1 hour from $43 per person, rated 5 from 9 reviews. Both depart from the Westminster Pier area, and both are among the very few ticketed experiences operating anywhere in London that day.

The reason the list is so short is simple: nothing else moves. Transport for London does not run any service on Christmas Day, no Tube, no bus, no tram, no Overground, no Elizabeth line and no DLR, and no national rail trains run anywhere in the United Kingdom on 25 December. That has been the confirmed pattern in recent years, and the 2026 festive timetable has not been published yet, so the honest advice is to treat it as the pattern and check TfL in December. Crews, boats and passengers all have to get to the pier without public transport, which is why the day's offering is a handful of sailings rather than a full timetable.

The two cruises serve very different plans. The lunch cruise is the day out: you board around midday, sit down to a traditional Christmas lunch, and glide past the closed-up landmarks while the city is at its quietest. The sightseeing cruise is the lighter option, a single hour on the water with commentary, easy to slot between a morning walk in Hyde Park and an afternoon in Chinatown. Both are honest products with real review pools, though the sightseeing cruise's 5 rating comes from only 9 reviews, so treat that number as a small sample rather than a verdict. If you're weighing whether a river cruise is the right way to spend your money in London at all, the honest verdict on Thames cruise value at Christmas compares the lunch, dinner and afternoon tea sailings side by side.

A third option exists for people whose real question is what can I do on Christmas Day at all: a combined coach tour and Thames lunch cruise, run by an established London operator, which pairs a guided drive past the sights with the boat and lunch, roughly 6.5 to 7 hours in total from Victoria, at around £228 per adult. It is not a cruise in the pure sense, but the river leg is the centrepiece, and the coach solves the problem that nothing else in the city is moving.

How Do The Two Christmas Day Cruises Compare?

The lunch cruise is the premium choice: 3.5 hours, from $232 per person, a full traditional Christmas meal on board, rated 4.5 from 47 reviews. The sightseeing cruise is the budget choice: about 1 hour, from $43 per person, no meal, rated 5 from 9 reviews with free cancellation per the listing. Pick the lunch cruise if the boat is the day's main event; pick the sightseeing cruise for a short river leg.

The price gap is large, and it mostly buys the meal and the time. At from $232 per person, the lunch cruise sits in the band of a restaurant Christmas dinner in central London, which is roughly what it is, except the restaurant drifts past Parliament. The sightseeing cruise at from $43 per person costs about what a normal Thames sightseeing ticket costs on any other day, which is its quiet advantage: you are not paying a Christmas premium for the shorter sailing, just getting a rare boat on a rare day. If you're budgeting for other festive outings too, the full price guide to Santa grottos and family experiences in London shows what those visits typically charge.

Both listings describe a similar route, past the closed London Eye, the illuminated-but-empty South Bank, and the sequence of bridges that carry almost no traffic on the day. The lunch cruise's 47 reviews make it the better-evidenced product of the two; the sightseeing cruise's 9 reviews are a thin pool, and the 5 rating should be read as a small number of very satisfied passengers rather than a mass verdict. Neither figure should be rounded up into a superlative, and this article will not do so.

The cancellation terms deserve a sentence of care. The sightseeing cruise states free cancellation on its listing; the lunch cruise does not state cancellation terms on its card, so if your plans might shift, check the terms on the live listing before booking, and treat the booking as closer to a restaurant reservation than a flexible sightseeing ticket. Christmas Day is the single least refundable day of the year in London hospitality, because operators are staffing a day almost nobody works.

One planning note that is easy to miss: getting to Westminster Pier on 25 December means walking, cycling, a taxi or a private hire car. Santander Cycles and some e-scooter rentals have operated on Christmas Day in past years, and taxis and private hire vehicles run, but there is no rail option at any price. If your hotel is not within a sensible walk of the river, budget for a taxi in both directions, and leave more time than you think you need, because the empty streets are a novelty that tempts everyone into underestimating distances.

Does Uber Boat By Thames Clippers Run On Christmas Day?

No. Uber Boat by Thames Clippers, the regular river bus service, runs no service on Christmas Day, and none on Boxing Day either. The only scheduled passenger boats on the Thames on 25 December are the special Christmas Day cruises described above, which must be booked as tickets rather than tapped onto with a normal river bus fare.

This trips up a lot of visitors, because the Clippers service feels like public transport: you tap in with a contactless card the way you would on a bus, and on any normal December day it is a genuinely useful way to move along the river. But the operator's own service information confirms no Christmas Day or Boxing Day sailings, which is consistent with the wider shutdown: the boats' crews and the piers' staff face the same absent transport network as everyone else. The operator's FAQ is the place to confirm the position before you travel, and the TfL Christmas service announcement sets out the wider picture for the rest of the network.

The practical consequence is that you cannot improvise a Christmas Day river trip. On 23 December you can wander to a pier and hop on the next boat; on 25 December the river is closed to casual travel, and the only way onto the water is a pre-booked seat on one of the special sailings. If you are reading this in November, that is actually good news: the scarcity means the bookable cruises fill up, and the sightseeing cruise in particular, with its low price and short duration, tends to be the first thing families add to a Christmas Day plan. The wider set of guides lives on Christmas In London.

For anyone weighing a wider festive river plan, the Thames Christmas cruises guide covers the full season, including the party lunch and dinner sailings that run in late November and December on normal days, when the river is busy and the timetable is full.

What Is Christmas Day Actually Like On The River?

Quiet in a way the Thames never is otherwise. The river carries no commuter clippers, no sightseeing fleets and almost no private traffic, the bridges stand empty, and the banks are walked rather than worked. Passengers on the Christmas Day sailings consistently describe the strangeness of passing world-famous landmarks with nobody on the streets, an experience no other day of the year offers from the water.

The weather is worth setting expectations for. December in London typically brings daytime highs of about 8 to 10 degrees Celsius, lows of 3 to 5, and around 50 to 60 mm of rain across the month, with sunset around 15:50 in mid-December. A 1-hour sightseeing cruise in the early afternoon finishes in daylight; the lunch cruise, boarding around midday and running 3.5 hours, will end as the light goes. The boats are heated and enclosed, but the outdoor decks, where the best photographs happen, are cold, and the how to dress for London in December piece is worth a read before you pack for this particular day.

What you pass is the whole postcard sequence: the London Eye, closed on Christmas Day but still lit and turning slowly as a landmark if not a ride; the South Bank, whose Winter Market closed for the day; Waterloo and Blackfriars bridges carrying a fraction of their usual load; the Tower of London silent on its wall; and Greenwich downstream if the sailing runs that far. None of the museums are open, the major attractions from the Tower Bridge Exhibition to the London Zoo are shut, and Westminster Abbey and St Paul's hold services rather than sightseeing. The boat is one of the only moving platforms in the city, which is precisely its appeal. If you're wondering how far the shutdown extends beyond the river, our guide to what stays open and closed in London on Christmas Day covers the rest of the city.

Families should note the age question. The lunch cruise is a seated meal, so it suits children old enough to enjoy a long table; the sightseeing cruise's single hour is more forgiving of short attention spans and is the cheaper family option by a wide margin at from $43 per person. Neither listing markets itself specifically at children, so check the live listing for child pricing and policies before booking, because Christmas Day products often differ from their year-round equivalents.

What If The Christmas Day Cruises Are Sold Out?

Your fallbacks are the coach-and-cruise combinations, which run on 25 December from Victoria at around £228 per adult, or shifting your river plan to Boxing Day, when a reduced Sunday-style service returns to the TfL network and the city begins to reopen. There is no waiting list and no turn-up-and-go option on the river on Christmas Day itself: if the sailings are full, the river is closed to you for the day.

The coach combinations deserve more attention than they usually get. Because the coach solves the transport problem, they are the only Christmas Day product that works from anywhere in the city, not just from a hotel within walking distance of Westminster. The established operator's version runs a guided drive past the sights, then the Thames lunch cruise, roughly 6.5 to 7 hours door to river to door, from Victoria. At around £228 per adult it is pricier than the lunch cruise alone, but it packages the whole day rather than one leg of it.

If the day itself is lost to sell-outs, the honest advice is to move your river experience to the evening of a normal December day instead. The Christmas party dinner cruise, a 4-hour sailing from $126 per person with a 4.3 rating from 16 reviews, runs on selected December dates before Christmas rather than on the day itself, and it delivers the same combination of food, music and illuminated riverbanks that people imagine when they picture a Christmas cruise. It is not a Christmas Day product, and it should not be booked as one, but as a consolation it is a good one.

That dinner cruise pairs naturally with the party lunch cruise, a 3-hour sailing from $99 per person rated 4.7 from 17 reviews, for groups weighing a daytime festive meal on the water on a normal December date. Neither is a 25 December product, but both scratch the same itch with far more dates and larger capacities to choose from.

The wider season also matters for anyone planning early. The Mayor of London's New Year's Eve fireworks return on Thursday 31 December 2026 at 8pm, with ticketed viewing areas and a ticket release date still to be announced, and a range of NYE river cruises are already listed for the night. A Christmas Day cruise and a New Year's Eve cruise make a natural pair for a week-long festive visit, and booking the 25 December sailing first is the right order of operations, because it is the scarcer ticket by far.

Booking timing, in short: the Christmas Day cruises go on sale with the rest of the season's listings in autumn, and the lunch cruise in particular has a physical capacity that a restaurant meal implies. Book as early as your plans allow, recheck the cancellation terms on the live listing, and arrange your transport to the pier before the day, since on 25 December there is no second option if you miss the boat in both senses.

Common Questions About Christmas Day Cruises In London

Are There Any Christmas Day Cruises Available In London?

Yes. Two bookable Thames cruises run on 25 December: a 3.5-hour Christmas Day lunch cruise from $232 per person, rated 4.5 from 47 reviews, and a 1-hour sightseeing cruise from $43 per person, rated 5 from 9 reviews. A combined coach tour and lunch cruise also runs from Victoria at around £228 per adult.

Does Uber Boat By Thames Clippers Run On Christmas Day?

No. The river bus service runs no Christmas Day or Boxing Day sailings. The only passenger boats on the Thames on 25 December are the special pre-booked Christmas Day cruises.

How Much Does A Christmas Day Cruise In London Cost?

The sightseeing cruise starts from $43 per person for about an hour on the water. The lunch cruise starts from $232 per person for 3.5 hours with a traditional Christmas meal included. The combined coach-and-cruise day runs at around £228 per adult.

How Do I Get To Westminster Pier On Christmas Day?

There is no public transport: no Tube, bus, rail or river bus on 25 December. You will need to walk, cycle, drive or take a taxi or private hire car. Santander Cycles and taxis have operated on Christmas Day in past years, but leave generous time for the journey.

Can I Cancel A Christmas Day Cruise Booking?

It depends on the ticket. The sightseeing cruise states free cancellation on its listing; the lunch cruise does not state cancellation terms on its card, so check the live listing before booking and treat it as closer to a restaurant reservation than a flexible sightseeing ticket.

What Else Is Open In London On Christmas Day?

The Royal Parks are open and free, Chinatown's restaurants and hotel dining rooms serve, Westminster Abbey and St Paul's hold services, and a small number of coach and boat tours run. Museums, the London Eye, Winter Wonderland and the Warner Bros. Studio Tour are closed.