The Best Day Tours You Can Take From Phoenix, Ranked

What This Ranking Covers And How We Built It

This page ranks every bookable departure on the roster, 34 tours across seven categories: Grand Canyon, Antelope Canyon and Horseshoe Bend, Sedona and Red Rock, Apache Trail and Sonoran Desert, hot air balloon flights, Tombstone and Saguaro, and private day tours. Every price, rating and review count below comes from the live listings, and where a listing is too new to judge, we say so plainly instead of rounding up its virtues.

The ranking is built from listing data only: price per person, rating, review count, duration, departure point and whether hotel pickup is offered. Nothing here is scored on marketing copy or a writer's impression of a view. Where two tours cost the same, the tiebreaker is the size and consistency of the review pool behind the rating, because a 4.8 from 2,580 travelers and a 5.0 from eight travelers are not the same kind of fact, and pretending otherwise is how bad recommendations get made.

Two pricing quirks matter before you compare anything. The guided UTV tour is priced at $204 for the whole vehicle, up to two riders, not per person, which makes it one of the cheapest group options on the roster once you divide it out. Two of the three private tours are also group-priced, at $975 and $1,125 for up to five people, so they look expensive per person and are not.

This ranking is maintained by Day Tours from Phoenix, and it exists because the metro's tour market is genuinely hard to read from a first page of search results: the same three marquee destinations appear on dozens of near-identical listings, and the differences that actually matter, pickup point, hours, review depth and cancellation terms, are buried in the fine print of each operator's live listing.

The Seven Categories At A Glance

The roster splits into seven tour families, from $155 for a two-hour sunset jeep ride to $475 for a full Saguaro, Tombstone and Bisbee circuit. Five categories lean on Phoenix departures, two on Scottsdale pickup points, and durations run the full span: two-hour desert rides at the short end, 15 to 16-hour Page round trips at the long end.

Read as a whole, the roster rewards two different kinds of traveler. If you have one long free day, the Grand Canyon and Antelope Canyon categories spend it completely, and the price gap between them, roughly $229 against roughly $351, is mostly a function of the drive: Page is about 275 miles from Phoenix while the South Rim is roughly 225. If you only have a morning or an afternoon, the desert category is the only one that sells you something worthwhile in under three hours, and its sunset jeep tour is among the best-reviewed departures anywhere on the roster.

The cheapest full-day options sit in the Sedona category, where two Jerome-and-Montezuma-Castle combinations start at $165. That makes Sedona the budget destination for a full day out and Page the premium one, with the Grand Canyon in the middle. Nothing in the Tombstone category is cheap, and the private tier is priced for groups rather than solo travelers, as the group rates above show.

If you already know your destination, the three tours below are the ones most readers comparing this page end up choosing between: the value Grand Canyon departure, the longest canyon-country day trip, and the balloon flight that fits a morning.

Which Tours Have Deep Review Histories And Which Are Brand New

Review depth on this roster is uneven, and it matters more than the rating number. Four departures carry pools in the thousands: the small-group Grand Canyon with Sedona tour at 2,580 reviews, the sunset jeep tour at 2,769, the balloon ride with bubbly and breakfast at 2,164, and the 8 a.m. UTV tour at 1,670. Four listings have no reviews at all because they are brand new.

Our rule throughout this site is simple: a rating is only as strong as its pool. The tours in the top half of that table have earned their scores across hundreds or thousands of bookings, which is why we describe them as well-reviewed. The ones at the bottom have fine ratings and almost no evidence behind them, so we print the count every time and let you decide whether a 5.0 from eight people reassures you.

The brand-new listings cluster in two categories. Both Tombstone day tours that pair Bisbee with other stops are new enough that one has no reviews yet, and the Saguaro National Park, Tombstone and Bisbee tour is in the same position. Two of the three private tours are also fresh listings with no reviews yet. None of that means they are bad products; it means the rating column cannot help you choose between them yet, and the itinerary, the price and the operator's live listing have to do the work instead.

A few mid-tier pools deserve credit. The Grand Canyon with Sedona and Oak Creek day tour, this page's top pick, carries 4.8 across 566 reviews, a genuinely substantial sample. The largest-balloon flight holds 4.8 across 816 reviews, and the Antelope Canyon and Horseshoe Bend Day Adventure has 4.9 across 113. These are the departures where the ratings are readable and the counts back them up.

The Best Grand Canyon Departures

Five Grand Canyon departures leave the Phoenix metro, all rated 4.8 or 4.9, priced from $229 to $299 per person, and all between 11 and 13 hours door to door. The pick of the group is the Grand Canyon with Sedona and Oak Creek day tour: from $229, rated 4.8 across 566 reviews, hotel pickup offered, and the listing flags that it often sells out.

The Grand Canyon with Sedona and Oak Creek day tour wins the value comparison on price, but its real edge is the itinerary shape: it is the shortest of the five at roughly 11 hours, which on a category where every departure is a marathon means the difference between getting back at a civilized hour and not. It also carries a comfortably large review pool at 566, so the 4.8 is backed by real evidence. Check availability

If review depth matters more to you than $70, the small-group Grand Canyon with Sedona tour is the category's evidence leader at 2,580 reviews for the same $229 starting price, though it runs two hours longer. At the other end, the Small Group Grand Canyon National Park Day Tour at $299 focuses the whole day on the park itself rather than splitting it with Sedona, which suits travelers who have already seen the red rocks.

One planning fact sits outside every listing: Grand Canyon National Park charges $35 per private vehicle at the entrance, valid for seven days at both rims, per the National Park Service fee page. Whether a given tour's price includes that fee varies by operator, so confirm it on the live listing before you book. As noted above, the 2026 flood closed in-park lodging and Phantom Ranch through at least October 31, but the viewpoints and Rim Trail that day tours actually use have stayed open throughout.

The Best Sedona And Red Rock Options

Four Sedona departures run from $165 to $225 per person, between 8 hours and a full day, and every one offers hotel pickup. The two cheapest, the Sedona, Jerome and Montezuma Castle day trip and the Sedona with Jerome and Montezuma Castle one-day van tour, both start at $165 with review pools of 39 and 69 respectively, readable but shallow compared with the rest of the roster.

The Sedona category is where the roster's best price-to-experience ratio lives. The Sedona, Jerome and Montezuma Castle day trip at $165 is the cheapest full-day tour on the whole site, and the Sedona with Montezuma Castle small-group tour at $179 adds a smaller vehicle for $14 more. The category's most expensive option, the Montezuma Castle, Jerome and Sedona day tour from Scottsdale or Phoenix at $225, also happens to be the one whose 5.0 rating comes from only eight reviews, a good example of why this page prints counts beside every score.

Most of these tours pair the red rock country with the Verde Valley's two historical stops: Montezuma Castle National Monument, which charges $10 per adult for entrance and covers the nearby Tuzigoot as well for seven days according to the monument's fee page, and the hillside mining town of Jerome, whose tasting rooms have turned a former copper camp into a wine stop. For a deeper look at the destination itself, our Sedona day trip planning guide breaks down the drive, roughly 115 miles and two hours each way, and the trailhead shuttle system.

One 2026 wrinkle is worth a clause: the Pocket Fire near Oak Creek Canyon forced closures and evacuations over the summer, and lingering effects on the West Fork and Slide Rock swim areas stretched into October. Sedona itself and the main tour corridors stayed open, but if a specific stop matters to you, confirm it on the listing before booking.

The Best Antelope Canyon And Horseshoe Bend Tours

Only three departures on the roster reach Page, and they are long: 13 to 16 hours round trip, from $351 to $390 per person, with ratings of 4.9 or 5.0 from pools of 42, 63 and 113 reviews. The most readable is the Antelope Canyon and Horseshoe Bend Day Adventure from Scottsdale or Phoenix, rated 4.9 across 113 reviews from $390.

This category has hard constraints no tour can design around. Antelope Canyon is accessible only through an authorized Navajo-guided tour, with a $15 per-person Navajo Parks permit on top of every tour price, and the drive from Phoenix is about 275 miles each way, four and a half to five hours behind the wheel. That is why every listing in the table is a 13-to-16-hour commitment, and why the cheapest one is also the longest.

The Horseshoe Bend stop carries its own fee: the City of Page lot charges $10 per passenger vehicle, and no federal pass is accepted there, per the city's official parking page. Tour vehicles pay the higher commercial tiers, which is normally folded into your ticket, but independent travelers should not arrive expecting to use an annual pass.

The From Scottsdale departure, at $351 and a 15-to-16-hour day, is the category's value floor and its earliest morning. It flags as likely to sell out, which tracks with how Page tours behave generally: canyon slots, especially the light-beam windows in Upper Antelope Canyon, are often booked four to six weeks out and sometimes months ahead in summer. Our guide on how far in advance to book an Antelope Canyon tour covers the timing in detail.

Monsoon season, July through September, adds a scheduling caveat the listings mention but travelers often miss: flash-flood risk can cancel canyon entries on short notice even on a clear morning at your hotel. That is a reason to keep your Antelope day early in your trip rather than on your last day, and to read the operator's cancellation terms before booking.

The Best Apache Trail And Sonoran Desert Tours

Ten departures cover the Apache Trail and the Sonoran Desert, and this is the roster's value zone: sunset jeep rides from $155 per person, Apache Trail and Dolly Steamboat van tours from $168, and a guided UTV option at $204 for the whole vehicle, up to two people. Durations run from two hours to a full nine-hour day, so the category fits a free morning as well as a full day off.

The evidence in this category is unusually strong for short tours. The Sonoran Desert jeep tour at sunset holds 5.0 across 2,769 reviews, the largest pool on the entire roster, at $155 per person for roughly two hours. The 8 a.m. desert off-road UTV tour holds 5.0 across 1,670 reviews at $199 per person. The guided UTV or ATV desert tour carries 4.9 across 291 reviews at $204 per group, and the two mid-size Apache Trail vans sit at 4.7 across 278 and 4.8 across 207. In no other category can you choose between four options with pools that deep.

The Apache Trail full-day options all follow the paved State Route 88 corridor out to Tortilla Flat and Canyon Lake, roughly 55 miles and an hour to an hour and a half from Phoenix, rather than descending the unpaved Fish Creek Hill stretch. The practical 2026 wrinkle is the one noted above: the Canyon Lake drawdown running through January 2027 is affecting the Dolly Steamboat cruise and Tortilla Flat foot traffic, so if the steamboat is the reason you are choosing a Trail tour, confirm it is running on your date. Our Apache Trail tour guide covers the route, the stops and the current conditions stop by stop.

The short desert tours deserve more attention than they usually get from first-time visitors planning a single big excursion. A sunset jeep ride through Tonto National Forest under a USFS special-recreation permit is the cheapest well-reviewed product on the site, it needs no full-day commitment, and it delivers the Sonoran landscape most travelers come to Arizona expecting. For travelers with only a weekend in the city, pairing a two-hour jeep tour with one full-day trip often beats cramming two marquee destinations into two exhausting days.

Balloons, Tombstone And Private Departures

Four balloon flights lift off from the Phoenix area between $199 and $261 per person, and the Tombstone category holds five departures from $250 to $475. The private tier is small but spread wide: a private Lower Antelope Canyon tour from $430 per person, a private Apache Trail tour at $975 for up to five people, and a private Tombstone trip at $1,125 for the same group size.

The balloon category's evidence leader is the morning ride with bubbly and breakfast: 4.8 across 2,164 reviews, from $239, about four hours door to door with hotel pickup, and flagged as often selling out. The largest-balloon flight, 4.8 across 816 reviews at $199, is the category's price floor and meets on site rather than picking up. The Peoria balloon ride carries a 5.0 from a single review, which we state plainly rather than dress up: one review is a data point, not a verdict.

Tombstone is the roster's honesty test. Two of the five departures, the Tombstone and Bisbee day tour and the Saguaro National Park, Tombstone and Bisbee combination, are brand-new listings with no reviews yet. The other three carry pools of 7, 8 and 18 reviews, all fine scores, none deep enough to call proven. Choose in this category on itinerary and price, not on ratings: the $365 Tombstone day trip, the $345 Old West day trip, and the two $250 combinations differ mainly in how many stops they pack into roughly 11 hours.

The private tier is priced for groups, as the per-group figures above show, and the one per-person exception, the private Lower Antelope Canyon tour at $430 with 5.0 across 34 reviews, splits the difference between a private van and a standard canyon day trip. For a family of five, the $975 Apache Trail private tour covers everyone in that single group price, which makes it competitive with the group tours once you count the flexibility.

For the balloon morning specifically, the bubbly-breakfast flight is the departure we would point most travelers toward, and not only for the breakfast: it has more than double the review evidence of any competitor on the roster.

How To Match A Tour To Your Trip

Pick by three variables: hours available, tolerance for a long drive, and what you want to photograph. Two free hours points to a jeep or UTV ride; a morning suits a balloon flight; a full day fits the Grand Canyon, Sedona or the Apache Trail; and only a very long day reaches Page, so the Antelope Canyon tours demand the biggest commitment on the roster.

Timing matters as much as the choice itself. Summer in Phoenix runs hot enough that the National Weather Service's Phoenix office issues heat alerts on its HeatRisk framework, which weighs forecast highs, overnight lows, duration and how unusual the heat is for the date rather than any single temperature trigger; the practical advice is to check the live NWS Phoenix heat page before booking any midday outdoor activity between June and September, and to favor the sunrise balloon flights and early-morning desert tours. Monsoon season, June through September, is also when Page canyon entries occasionally cancel on flash-flood risk.

If this is your first Arizona trip, our picks for first-time visitors from Phoenix are built around the same roster, and the budget comparison guide breaks the whole price ladder down if cost is the deciding variable. Families should also skim the family-friendly day tour guide, since the two-hour UTV and jeep tours and the balloon mornings fit kids' attention spans far better than a 16-hour Page day.

One last rule of thumb from the data: the tours flagged as often selling out on their listings are, in order, the two cheapest Grand Canyon departures, the Scottsdale Antelope tour, the two biggest balloon flights, and the two Sedona small-group tours. That is almost the entire value tier of the roster, which tells you the best-priced departures are also the ones to book soonest.

Common Questions About Phoenix Day Tours