Salt Island Seaplanes

Salt Island Seaplanes flies out of Naples Municipal Airport, offering scenic seaplane tours over one of the more distinctive landscapes in Southwest Florida: the Ten Thousand Islands, a maze of mangrove islands and shallow water channels stretching south from Naples toward the Everglades that is difficult to appreciate fully from ground level. A seaplane trip gives passengers a view of that terrain, along with the barrier islands, backwater channels and open Gulf water, that a boat tour simply cannot replicate.

The standard offering is a roughly 30-minute scenic flight, short enough to fit into an afternoon without major planning but long enough to cover a meaningful stretch of coastline and backcountry. For visitors who want a longer outing, the company also offers picnic tour options that combine the flight with a stop, turning the seaplane ride into a half-day excursion rather than just a quick loop over the water.

Beyond local sightseeing, Salt Island Seaplanes has historically run seasonal scheduled flights connecting Naples and Fort Myers with Key West, Captiva Island, Boca Grande and Useppa Island, operating from October 1 through April 30 and closed Wednesdays and select holidays during that window. This puts the company in a different category from most local tour operators, functioning partly as small regional air transportation alongside its scenic tour business, a niche few other operators in the area attempt given the cost and complexity of running a seaplane operation.

The airport location, at Terminal Drive near the main Naples Municipal Airport terminal building, sits within the incorporated city limits of Naples even though it is set apart from the downtown waterfront district where most of the city’s boat-based tour operators are based. Free parking at the airport makes it straightforward for visitors driving in rather than staying downtown, and advance reservations are recommended given the limited number of seats on each flight.

For visitors who have already done a boat tour of Naples Bay or a fishing charter and want a different vantage point on the same coastline, a seaplane flight offers a genuinely different experience, covering in half an hour a stretch of the Ten Thousand Islands and backcountry that would take hours to see by boat. It remains one of the few operators in the immediate Naples area offering this kind of scenic air tour rather than a boat-based excursion.

Seaplane travel also carries a bit of its own history in Southwest Florida, where small aircraft on floats have connected coastal towns and barrier islands since long before modern roads and bridges reached some of the more remote Gulf Coast communities. Flying out of Naples Municipal Airport keeps that tradition alive on a smaller scale, giving passengers a taste of a form of regional travel that has otherwise largely disappeared from most of the country.