Anguilla in 5 Days on a Budget (With Daily Costs)

Five days in Anguilla on a budget: the honest costs

Anguilla is not a cheap Caribbean island, and five days does not change that. It buys the full headline set, best beaches, a first offshore cay, Scilly Cay’s lobster lunch, plus one deliberately slow day rather than a fifth new checklist item. Only here for four days? The 4-day plan covers everything except that slow day. A full week? The 7-day plan adds a second cay and a St Martin day trip on top of this.

Day Focus Travel time Rough daily cost
Day 1 SXM arrival, public ferry to Blowing Point, Shoal Bay East, beach-bar dinner 20-25 min ferry crossing plus a taxi to base $90-150
Day 2 Meads Bay, Rendezvous Bay, a second beach-bar meal short fixed-rate taxi hops between beaches $60-100
Day 3 First offshore cay (Sandy Island or Prickly Pear), Heritage Collection Museum, The Valley 5-10 min boat crossing from Sandy Ground $80-140
Day 4 Scilly Cay lobster lunch, plus Little Bay snorkel or a rental-car island loop 5-10 min dinghy to Scilly Cay, or about 45 minutes if you drive the loop $110-200
Day 5 A slow repeat day at your favorite beach so far, no new sights none, stay put $50-90

Book these before you go:

Day 1: SXM, the public ferry and Shoal Bay East

Land at Princess Juliana International Airport (SXM) on Sint Maarten, not Anguilla itself; the island’s own airport has limited direct service, so almost everyone arrives this way. Taxi to the ferry pier at Marigot on the French side, then take the public ferry to Blowing Point: about 20-25 minutes, roughly $30 per adult one-way plus a separate departure tax that different sources quote differently, so confirm current fares at anguillaferrytimes.com before you fly. A private charter departs the Dutch side and skips the Marigot taxi transfer, but starts around $65 per person one-way, more than double the public fare, so the ferry is the real budget win here.

Settle into a base at West End or Sandy Ground, then spend the afternoon at Shoal Bay East, a two-mile stretch of white sand on the north coast with reef close enough to snorkel from shore. Entry is free, same as every one of Anguilla’s 33 beaches; the only real spend is a rented lounger or a drink from a beachfront shack. For dinner, skip the fine-dining tier and eat at a casual beach bar like Sunshine Shack or the Dune Preserve on Rendezvous Bay, where a grilled-catch plate and a rum punch cost a fraction of the same meal up the road at a resort restaurant.

Day 2: Meads Bay, Rendezvous Bay and a beach-bar bill you can actually plan for

Spend the morning at Meads Bay, the glossiest strip on the island and home to Blanchards, Anguilla’s best-known splurge restaurant. Walk the beach and admire the resort row for free, then eat at one of the more casual spots nearby rather than booking the main restaurant, which alone can run past a two-day food budget. The afternoon belongs to Rendezvous Bay, long and quiet with clear sightlines across the channel to St Martin, and a second casual beach-bar meal to close the day.

Get around both days by fixed-rate taxi. The East Caribbean dollar (EC$/XCD) is pegged at $1 to EC$2.70, but nearly every price you actually see on a menu or a fare card is already quoted in US dollars. Do the math once and you can stop thinking about it: an EC$54 plate of fish is exactly $20, and an EC$100 taxi receipt is just under $37.

Day 3: your first offshore cay

The offshore cays are a genuine step up from a third straight beach day, and worth building the whole day around. Sandy Island is a five-minute boat ride from Sandy Ground, commonly run by the long-standing Captain Jojo operator, with an on-cay restaurant, loungers and hammocks. Prickly Pear is a slightly longer crossing with two established beach restaurants, Agatha’s and Johnno’s, plus better snorkeling. Boat operators here run by the trip rather than a posted price list, so expect to pay in cash and confirm the fare before you board; the exact current rate was not pinned down to a single source at publish time.

Back on the mainland, spend a spare hour at the Heritage Collection Museum near The Valley, covering the island’s history from the pre-Columbian period through the 1967 Anguillian Revolution; admission and hours were not confirmed at publish time, so check locally before planning your afternoon around it. Round out the day with a short walk through The Valley itself, past the restored 1787 Wallblake House, before heading back to your base for the evening.

Day 4: Scilly Cay’s lobster lunch, Little Bay and the island loop

Head to Island Harbour on the East End and wave from the pier, the way visitors to Scilly Cay always have; a dinghy motors across to collect you for grilled lobster and a heavy-handed rum punch. Historically the cay has opened only a few lunch days a week, commonly cited as Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, and its own website has lapsed, so confirm the current schedule with your hotel or a recent review before building the day around it. Lunch here runs well above the beach-bar tier; treat it as the day’s one planned splurge.

Fill the rest of the day one of two ways. Without a car, book a short boat trip to Little Bay, a secluded north-coast cove with strong snorkeling, and taxi everywhere else; the rope-assisted scramble down the cliffside to Little Bay exists but needs a current-conditions check before treating it as a casual DIY route. With a rental car, buy the temporary Anguilla driving permit through the rental company, roughly $15 for a short stay or $25 for three months, drive on the left, and loop the island’s roughly 45-minute end-to-end route past Maundays Bay, Cap Juluca’s effectively-private beach, and back through the East End.

Day 5: a slow day, on purpose

By day five you have already seen Anguilla’s actual headline list: two top beaches, an offshore cay, Scilly Cay’s lobster lunch. There is no fifth distinct sight to add, so the honest move is to go back to whichever beach earned it, Shoal Bay East if you want the reef, Meads Bay if you want the resort-row people-watching, and spend the day with a lounger, a paperback and the same beach bar you liked on day one. This is the point where a longer Anguilla trip stops being about new checklist items and starts being about pace; the 6-day plan and 7-day plan fill that same extra time with a second cay or a St Martin day trip instead, but neither is required to call a trip this length complete.

Budget the same as a normal beach day, a rented lounger, lunch and drinks at a beach bar, and a fixed-rate taxi if you switch beaches, without the boat fare or lobster-lunch splurge from the two days before it.

Is five days enough for Anguilla?

Yes, and then some. Five days covers every beach and cay that actually distinguishes this island, Shoal Bay East, Meads Bay, Rendezvous Bay, a first offshore cay, Scilly Cay’s lobster lunch, plus a slow day with no agenda. What it skips is a second cay and a St Martin day trip; the 6-day plan and 7-day plan add those on top of this same route, not more of the same sights stretched thinner.

How much does five days in Anguilla actually cost?

Budget roughly $390-680 per person across all five days for ferry, taxis, boats, food and drink, lodging separate. That is not cheap by Caribbean standards, and it should not be: Anguilla’s whole identity, no cruise port, no casinos, no high-rises, is built around staying upscale rather than high-volume. The single biggest lever on the total is accommodation and timing; a room booked outside the December-April dry season runs noticeably less than the same room in peak season.

Is Anguilla safe for a five-day trip?

Yes, for the ordinary beach-and-cay experience, but not on a blanket claim of zero crime. The UK FCDO’s most recent update flags a 2025 spike in gang-related gun crime and robbery, serious enough that Anguillians held a public anti-gun-violence march in August 2025. That uptick is real and worth ordinary caution, avoiding isolated areas after dark and keeping valuables out of sight, but it has not changed the fact that crime targeting tourists on the beach circuit remains rare. Check the current UK advisory and the beach and cay listings at ivisitanguilla.com before you fly.

One thing to sort before you land

Confirm Scilly Cay’s current open days before you build day four around it; the venue runs on a small-operator schedule with no live site to check, so a message to your hotel or a recent review is worth more than an old blog post. Keep day five genuinely unplanned rather than filling it with a rushed extra excursion; the whole point of five days over four is the room to slow down.