An Evening for Two in Singapore: View, Boat or Food Tour?

Three kinds of evening are sold to couples here, and they are priced as though they were comparable. A viewpoint is around €24, a light-show cruise around €24, a food tour around €67. They are not the same product at three price points – they are answers to three different questions, and picking the wrong one is how people end up spending an evening near each other rather than with each other.

What the evening looks like whatever you choose

Singapore sits about one degree north of the equator, so the sun goes down between roughly 6:50 pm and 7:25 pm all year. Twilight near the equator is short – about twenty to twenty-five minutes – so the good light is gone by 7:45 pm and everything else here happens in the dark.

The fixed points after that: Garden Rhapsody at the Supertree Grove at 7:45 pm and 8:45 pm, Spectra in front of Marina Bay Sands at 8 pm and 9 pm nightly with a third show at 10 pm on Fridays and Saturdays. Both are about fifteen minutes and both are free to watch from public ground.

Hold on to that last point. It changes how the three options below should be read.

The view: the busiest thing in the city

The SkyPark Observation Deck is from €23.89, 4.5 stars from 7,937 reviews – more than anything else in our Singapore inventory. That number is the recommendation and the warning in one. It is the thing everybody does, and at 7:30 pm on the 56th floor you are doing it with everybody.

Entry is sold in timed slots rather than as an open ticket, and the evening slots are the ones that sell out. Two other things worth knowing before you plan a romantic hour up there: the infinity pool is not part of it, and from the roof of the hotel the hotel is not in your photograph. We deal with both in SkyPark by day or after dark.

The Singapore Flyer is from €31.40, 4.7 stars from 1,075 reviews – higher rated, eight euros dearer, and a genuinely different proposition: a fixed rotation in an enclosed capsule with the hotel and the bay in front of you rather than beneath you. The capsule is shared, so “private” it is not, but it is quieter than the deck. The straight comparison is in Flyer or SkyPark.

For something with nobody in it at all, the Sentosa Cable Car round trip from €23.89, 4.4 stars from 2,357 reviews, gives you a cabin to yourselves over the harbour. It is a different view – working port and green ridge, not skyline – and it is on the wrong side of the island for the light shows.

The boat: cheap and short, or long and organised

There are two completely different boats here and the price gap hides it.

The Singapore River Cruise is 40 minutes, from €17.41, 4.5 stars from 2,649 reviews – a bumboat from Clarke Quay towards Marina Bay, sheltered seating, commentary on board. It is the cheapest entry into the evening and it does not consume it.

The evening cruises are four-hour guided packages that happen to include a boat:

• River cruise with Garden Rhapsody and Spectra – from €23.89, 4.8 stars from 1,697 reviews, four hours, hotel pick-up and drop-off, a guide.
• Twilight tour with river cruise and light shows – from €71.67, 4.6 stars from 199 reviews, four hours.
• Singapore Twilights with a meal at Lau Pa Sat – from €37.54, 4.4 stars from 106 reviews, four hours, dinner included in the block.

Be clear-eyed about what a shared evening cruise is: a group, a guide, a public-address system and a schedule. It solves transport beautifully and it is very good value at €24. What it is not is an evening in which you talk to each other. If the point of the night is conversation, the boat is the wrong room.

The food tour: the most expensive hour, and the one you will remember

The evening food tours are genuinely good and genuinely pricey, and both halves of that deserve saying.

The guided street food tour at night is from €66.96, 4.6 stars from 509 reviews, 3 hours 30 minutes, nine tastings including bak kut teh, carrot cake, chicken rice and satay, along the waterfront. The local hawker food tour is also from €66.96, 4.7 stars from 216 reviews, three hours through Chinatown taking in Michelin Bib Gourmand stalls. The longest is the Singapore Stories food tour – from €86.37, 4.9 stars from 370 reviews, four hours, 12 or more tastings across Chinatown, Little India and Kampong Glam. A shorter option, the foodie experience with five tastings, is from €58.58, 4.7 stars from 358 reviews, three hours.

Now the honest arithmetic. A food tour costs roughly three times what a four-hour light-show cruise does for a comparable block of the evening, and hawker food itself costs a few dollars a plate if you walk into a hawker centre and point. What the money buys is somebody ordering for you, explaining what is in the bowl, and taking you to stalls you would not have picked out of forty.

Whether that is worth €67 each depends entirely on how much you like being told things. Some couples find it the best evening of the trip. Others would rather have found the stall themselves and sat there for two hours.

And the ratings are worth reading properly: 4.9 stars from 370 reviews on the four-hour tour is the strongest score of any food tour here, and that tour is also the dearest of them. Only one offer on this page rates higher – the customised private tour further down, at 5 stars from 262 reviews – and it costs more again.

If what you want is to be left alone

None of the above is private. These are:

• Private custom tour with a local guide – from €50, 4.8 stars from 323 reviews, two hours. The cheapest way to have a guide who is talking only to you, and the short duration is a feature rather than a compromise.
• Private walking tour with a local – from €78.50, 4.7 stars from 442 reviews, three to eight hours.
• Customised private tour by car, bus or on foot – from €94.61, 5 stars from 262 reviews, four hours. The dearest of the three, and the one where the route is yours.

The part nobody sells, and it is the best hour

Two people on the grass under the Supertrees at 8:45 pm see exactly the same Garden Rhapsody as the group that paid €24 for the coach. The gardens are open until 2 am. Spectra is free from the Event Plaza. The walk between them along the waterfront takes about the time between the shows.

That is not an argument against booking anything. It is an argument for being honest about what the booking is for: transport, a seat, a guide, or food. It is not for access. The view of the bay at night is the one thing in this city that nobody charges for.

Choosing, in one question

• Do you want to look at the city? A viewpoint. SkyPark if you want the altitude and can live with the crowd, the Flyer if you want the hotel in the picture, the cable car if you want the cabin to yourselves.
• Do you want to move through it without organising anything? A four-hour evening cruise at around €24. Best value on this page by a distance.
• Do you want to eat, and be told what you are eating? A food tour, at roughly three times the price, and worth it if that is the point.
• Do you want to talk? The 40-minute cruise, then the free shows, then somewhere to sit. Or two private hours with a guide who leaves when you ask.

Where to next

The show timetable and what clashes with what is in Singapore after dark. For a tight schedule, one evening in Singapore. The viewpoints are compared in full in Singapore’s viewpoints compared, and the sunset hour in viewpoint or river cruise.

The full evening range is on our Singapore night tours page, the eating on the food tours page, and the boats on the river cruise page.

Prices, durations and review counts were taken from the operators on the date above. Starting prices in particular move with demand, and the evening slots are the ones that move most.