Roatan in 3 days: 18 stops grouped by area, from 541 real places

A Roatan 3-day plan of 18 stops from the NomadSwipe app’s data, grouped by area because the island is long and thin: West Bay and West End on day one, Sandy Bay and the middle of the island on day two, French Harbour and east on day three. Stored hours rule out Sunday for days two and three.

Disclosure: I built NomadSwipe (Android), and I wrote this guide. Ratings, review counts, addresses and opening hours are the values stored in the app’s place data for Roatán, read on 7 November 2026. The stored rows were last updated between 11 April and 5 November 2026, so treat them as a snapshot.

The plan at a glance

• Day 1, West Bay to West End (7 stops): breakfast at Luna Muna, Gumbalimba Park, the South Shore Canopy Zipline, Tabyana Beach, lunch at La Palapa Beach Bar, Stanley Submarines and a sunset drink at Sundowners Beach Bar.
• Day 2, Sandy Bay and the middle of the island (6 stops): Manawakie Eco Nature Park, the Blue Harbor Tropical Arboretum, Jungle Top Adventures Zipline, lunch at Blue Bahia Beach Grill, Carambola Botanical Gardens and dinner at The Sunken Fish Restaurant.
• Day 3, French Harbour to Jonesville Bight (5 stops): Arch’s Iguana & Marine Park, the Pirates of the Caribbean Canopy Tour, lunch at Kristi’s Overlook, Parrot Tree Plantation and Hole in the Wall.
• Days of the week: day one works every day. Days two and three need a day that is not Sunday (see the table below).
• Distance: day one adds up to about 7.2 km by straight line between stored coordinates, day two to about 10.6 km and day three to about 10.3 km. The day centres are 6.6 and 14.9 km apart. These are not driving times.

A deck of 3,076 cards for 541 places

Roatan is not one clean deck in the app. Its cards sit in 29 destination rows with names such as West End, Honduras, Sandy Bay, Honduras, Roatan Island and Coxen Hole, and they are mixed in with cards from other places. Inside a box around the island there are 3,076 cards, 886 distinct place IDs and 541 places once repeats of the same name and position are merged. Of the 541, 108 are sights by my grouping, and they span 18 stored category values. Only 55 of those 108 are rated 4.0 or higher with at least 100 stored reviews, and 64 of the 108 have no stored opening hours. This plan uses 11 sights and 7 places to eat or drink, all rated 4.1 or higher with at least 136 reviews.

• Many of the sights are operators, not places you walk into. 51 of the 541 places have dive, diver, diving or scuba in the title (9%), and 29 of the 108 sights do (27%). Another 27 of the 108 sights are named as tours, ziplines, canopy tours, excursions or adventures. I used the fixed places and left the dive shops as swaps (details below).
• Prices, ferry and cruise times are left out. I did not source fees, transport or port schedules from official pages this run, so check each place’s own channel before you go.
• Add your own pins. Anything you want that the deck lacks is yours to add on the map yourself.

Which days of the week work

I parsed the stored weekly hours of the 15 stops that have them with a script, set a suggested start time for each, and tested every weekday. A stop fails a day if its stored hours are closed, do not cover the start time, or leave less than one hour before closing. Tabyana Beach, the Pirates of the Caribbean Canopy Tour and Parrot Tree Plantation have no stored hours, so the script cannot test them.

The Sunday gap is typical for this deck. Of the 210 places with stored hours, 53 show Sunday as closed (25%) and 23 show Monday as closed (11%). Compared with the Sedona deck, where 9% of places with hours show Sunday as closed, a Sunday here rules out more. With three days, put day one on the Sunday and the other two on any other days. Hours also change with the season and on public holidays, so confirm before you go.

Day 1: West Bay to West End

Day one is the compact one. By straight line between stored coordinates, five of the six legs are 1.49 km or less, and the one long leg is the 3.90 km from La Palapa Beach Bar in West Bay to Stanley Submarines in West End. The farthest pair, Stanley Submarines and La Palapa Beach Bar, is the same 3.90 km, and going stop to stop adds up to about 7.2 km. I read no transit or road source this run, so I give straight-line distances only and no travel times. Times below are my suggested start times.

1. 8:00, Luna Muna by Ibagari: stored as a restaurant, 4.9 from 1,287 reviews, open from 7 AM every day. A breakfast start before the park opens.
2. 9:30, Gumbalimba Park: stored as a park at an address that reads only “West Bay 34101”, 4.4 from 1,892 reviews, open 8 AM to 4 PM every day. 0.55 km from breakfast.
3. 11:30, South Shore Canopy Zipline: stored as a tourist attraction, 4.8 from 1,044 reviews, open 8 AM to 3:30 PM every day, so 11:30 leaves four hours. 0.71 km from the park.
4. 13:00, Tabyana Beach: stored as a beach in West Bay, 4.5 from 884 reviews, with no stored hours, so I cannot match it to a weekday. 1.49 km from the zipline.
5. 13:45, La Palapa Beach Bar: stored as a bar, 4.8 from 1,122 reviews, open 8 AM to 9 PM and to 12:30 AM on Friday and Saturday. 0.33 km from the beach, so this is lunch.
6. 15:30, Stanley Submarines: stored as a tourist attraction in West End, 5.0 from 154 reviews, open 9 AM to 6 PM every day, so 15:30 leaves 2.5 hours. 3.90 km from lunch.
7. 17:30, Sundowners Beach Bar: stored as a bar, 4.6 from 1,570 reviews, open 11 AM to 10 PM every day. Only 0.17 km from the last stop.

Day 2: Sandy Bay and the middle of the island

Day two starts at the east end of its stretch and works west. The farthest pair, Manawakie Eco Nature Park and The Sunken Fish Restaurant, is 8.20 km apart by straight line, and going stop to stop adds up to about 10.6 km. Two legs are long, 3.97 km from the arboretum to the zipline and 3.31 km from the zipline to lunch. The last two legs are 0.61 and 0.72 km. Times below are my suggested start times.

1. 8:00, Manawakie Eco Nature Park: stored as a park at an address that reads “Hottest Sparrow, Roatan 34101”, 4.8 from 423 reviews, open 7 AM to 4 PM Monday to Saturday and closed on Sunday.
2. 9:45, The Blue Harbor Tropical Arboretum: stored as outdoor, 4.8 from 136 reviews, the fewest reviews of any stop in the plan. One card stores 7 AM to 4:30 PM (3:30 PM on Saturday and Sunday), another stores 9 AM to 5 PM every day, so a 9:45 start works with either. 2.02 km from the park.
3. 11:30, Jungle Top Adventures Zipline: stored as outdoor (another card says tourist attraction), 4.9 from 762 reviews, open from 6:30 AM to 5 PM every day. 3.97 km from the arboretum.
4. 13:00, Blue Bahia Beach Grill: stored as seafood, 4.6 from 694 reviews, open 7 AM to 9 PM every day, with 10 cards for this one place in the deck. 3.31 km from the zipline.
5. 14:30, Carambola Botanical Gardens: stored as a garden, 4.3 from 344 reviews, open 8 AM to 4:30 PM Monday to Saturday and closed on Sunday, so 14:30 leaves two hours. 0.61 km from lunch.
6. 17:30, The Sunken Fish Restaurant: stored as seafood, 4.6 from 385 reviews, open 7 AM to 9 PM every day. 0.72 km from the gardens.

Day 3: French Harbour to Jonesville Bight

Day three is the easternmost and the thinnest in data, with only 4 sights in the French Harbour area meeting my review line. The farthest pair, Arch’s Iguana & Marine Park and Hole in the Wall, is 7.61 km apart by straight line, and going stop to stop adds up to about 10.3 km. The first three legs are 2.09 km or less. The final leg from Parrot Tree Plantation to Hole in the Wall is 4.89 km. Times below are my suggested start times.

1. 8:30, Arch’s Iguana & Marine Park: stored as a park, 4.2 from 624 reviews, open 8 AM to 4 PM Monday to Saturday and closed on Sunday.
2. 10:15, Pirates of the Caribbean Canopy Tour: stored as an amusement place, 4.7 from 604 reviews, with no stored hours. I know it only by its stored values. 1.56 km from the park.
3. 12:15, Kristi’s Overlook: stored as a bar (another card says restaurant, 4.8 from 110 reviews), 4.5 from 380 reviews, open 11 AM to 7 PM and to 6 PM on Sunday. 2.09 km from the canopy tour, and this is lunch.
4. 14:00, Parrot Tree Plantation and Beach Resort: stored as a beach, 4.1 from 1,217 reviews, with no stored hours. 1.72 km from lunch.
5. 15:15, Hole in the Wall: stored as a bar at Jonesville Bight, 4.1 from 300 reviews, open 10 AM to 6 PM every day, so 15:15 leaves 2 hours 45 minutes. 4.89 km from the beach.

Where the stored hours bind

These are the stops whose stored hours decide the start time or the day.

If you came to dive: swaps for day one

The dive shops are stored as sights, so a swap is a stored card, not a guess. These are the highest-rated ones with stored hours, all stored with a rating of 4.9 or better. I read nothing about what they offer, charge or require, and I did not check which of them are open to your certification level, so use this only as a shortlist.

What I left out, and why

• Cards with a US address on island coordinates. 79 of the 541 places have an address in the form “town, two capital letters, five digits” while their coordinates are on the island. Turquoise Bay Dive & Beach Resort (4.5 from 1,110 reviews, address in Panama City Beach) is one. I could not tell which of the address and the coordinates is wrong, so I took no address from a US-address card, though three of the 18 stops have such repeat cards (see the question on how the stops were chosen).
• Cards whose repeats disagree about hours. Roatan Island Brewing Co (4.9 and 5.0 from about 280 reviews) has two cards that give different Monday, Tuesday, Friday and Saturday hours, and one of them has a Florida address. Victor Bodden Tours is stored as closed on Saturday and open 9 AM to 4 PM or 9 AM to 5 PM on other days, depending on the card.
• Hours that look wrong. Mayan Eden (a zoo, 4.5 from 288 reviews) is stored as open 7 AM to 5 AM every day, and Roatan Henry Tour as open 7 AM to 4 AM on Saturday. I used neither.
• Hotels, resorts and rentals. They are the largest group of cards and almost none has stored hours, so I skipped them for a day plan.

Getting around between the stops

• Each day is one stretch of the island. The plan moves from the west end on day one to the middle on day two and the east on day three, with 6.6 and 14.9 km between the day centres. I read no transit, taxi, ferry or parking source, so I give no travel times, fares or parking advice.
• Straight lines understate the trip. Roads make each real leg longer than the straight-line figures above.
• In the app: each card shows its distance and opening status, and the list sorts by rating, distance or A to Z.

How I would swipe the Roatan deck

I built NomadSwipe, so this is the method I would use, not a trip I already took. I would open the Roatan deck and swipe right on the parks, gardens, beaches and a few places to eat, and left on anything with a US address or an operator I cannot tell from a shop, because the deck is thick with repeats and mixed in with cards from other places. I would check any card with missing hours before saving it. Then I would open the map to see which saved places cluster. In this deck they fall into three stretches along the one island road: West Bay and West End, Sandy Bay through the middle, and French Harbour east. I took one stretch per day. The closing-time pattern above is the part to check last, because a good cluster can still run into a 4 PM close on a Sunday. NomadSwipe is Android only.

Planning another city? See the 3 days in Chiang Mai, the 3 days in Porto, the 3 days in Budapest, the printable travel itinerary template, how to find things to do in a new city, how to save places for a trip, an app to plan a trip on a map or a travel swipe app. Another outdoors deck with thin sight data is Sedona in two days.

Questions about this Roatan plan

Can I follow this Roatan plan on any day of the week?

Day one works on all seven days. Days two and three do not work on a Sunday: Manawakie Eco Nature Park and Carambola Botanical Gardens are stored as closed on Sunday, and so is Arch’s Iguana & Marine Park. With three days, put day one on the Sunday. I tested the 15 stops with stored hours against every weekday, and the three without stored hours (Tabyana Beach, Pirates of the Caribbean Canopy Tour and Parrot Tree Plantation) could not be tested. The hours were read on 7 November 2026, so confirm them before you go.

Do I need a car or a taxi for this Roatan plan?

I read no transit, taxi or road source, so I cannot say what is available. Day one is compact, with six legs of 0.17 to 3.90 km by straight line between stored coordinates. Day two has two legs of about 4 km and 3 km, and day three has one leg of 4.89 km. Treat those as rides and check your own options, because roads make each real leg longer than the straight line.

How far apart are the three areas?

By straight line between the average stored coordinates of each day’s stops, day one (West Bay and West End) is 6.6 km from day two (Sandy Bay and Coxen Hole), and day two is 14.9 km from day three (French Harbour and Jonesville Bight). Day one and day three are 21.0 km apart. The stored extent of the box runs about 37.6 km corner to corner (33.0 km east to west), so the island is long enough that one base for every stop is a stretch.

Where are the dive shops in this plan?

None is in it. 51 of the 541 places have dive, diver, diving or scuba in the title (9%), and 29 of the 108 sights do, but I did not read what any of them offers, charges or requires, so I kept them out of a fixed schedule. If diving is why you are going, swap one of the day-one stops for a dive shop: Sun Divers, Roatan Divers and Coconut Tree Divers in West End and Infinity Divers Aqua Center in West Bay are all stored as 4.9 from at least 1,534 reviews, with stored hours.

Does this plan work for a cruise day?

I read no cruise-port, ferry or transfer source, so this guide cannot say. What the stored data does give is distance: day one is the shortest of the three, about 7.2 km in total by straight line, and every stop on it has stored hours except one beach. Check your own arrival and departure times against the stored hours table above.

How were the 18 stops chosen?

I picked cards by hand from the part of the deck that sits on the island, with a stored rating of 4.0 or higher and at least 100 stored reviews, then grouped them by area and checked each start time against the stored weekly hours. The addresses and hours shown are from island-address cards, and ratings and review counts are the highest among a place’s repeat cards. Three stops also have repeat cards with US addresses (La Palapa Beach Bar 8 of 19 cards, Sundowners Beach Bar 8 of 13, Manawakie Eco Nature Park 4 of 6), which I did not use. I skipped places whose duplicates disagree about hours in a way I could not settle. The lowest rating in the plan is 4.1 and the fewest reviews are 136.

Findings, method and sample

Sample and method. I read the NomadSwipe app’s place data on 7 November 2026 with read-only queries. Roatán has no single destination row. I took every row whose country is HND, excluded two rows named Custom Pin (7 cards, none of them on the island) and the rows with the country “Custom”, and kept the cards whose stored coordinates fall in a box around the island (latitude 16.20 to 16.52, longitude -86.62 to -86.20). The box keeps 3,076 cards from 8 destination rows: West End, Honduras (15 rows, 1,744 in the box), Sandy Bay, Honduras (4 rows, 945), Roatan, Honduras (115), Roatán, Honduras (84), Coxen Hole (2 rows, 69), Trujillo (63), Roatan Island (32) and Area, Honduras (24). Those rows are not clean: the West End and Sandy Bay rows hold 509 and 987 more cards outside the box, with stored latitudes from -25.86 to 56.95, and the Trujillo row holds 105 more. The box also drops mainland Honduras (the Tegucigalpa rows alone hold 216 cards at latitudes 13.92 to 14.12). Near the coast but outside the box are 83 further place IDs whose addresses name La Ceiba (25), Utila (20), Trujillo (15), Guanaja (3) or no town I searched for (20), so other Bay Islands are excluded by coordinates, not by name. Inside the box the stored extent runs from latitude 16.267 to 16.429 and longitude -86.602 to -86.293. I counted 886 distinct place IDs and merged repeats that share a name (case-insensitive) and a position (rounded to three decimals, about 110 m) into 541 places, taking the highest rating and review count among the repeats, and calling a place a sight if any of its cards is one. A sight is a card whose stored category is one of: tourist attraction, outdoor, beach, botanical garden, garden, park, zoo, lookout, hiking, amusement place, sports and recreation, boat tours, tours, activities, art gallery or museum (counted case-insensitively). An empty stored hours list counts as no stored hours. Areas are the nearest of six anchor points (West Bay, West End, Sandy Bay, Coxen Hole, French Harbour, Oak Ridge), each set to the average coordinates of cards whose address names that area, so the Coxen Hole group is the middle of the island and not just the town. I measured distance in a straight line between stored coordinates.

• Of the 541 places, 371 have a stored rating, and 341 of those are rated 4.0 or higher (92%). 260 are rated 4.5 or higher (70%). The median stored rating is 4.7, which makes ratings a weak filter in this deck.
• The deck is 5.7 cards per place: 3,076 cards for 541 places. 423 titles occur on more than one card. Sea Salt Fine Dining Beach Bistro has 26 cards, La Palapa Beach Bar 19, Gumbalimba Park 15, Luna Muna by Ibagari 15 and Blue Bahia Beach Grill 10.
• The 108 sights span 18 stored category values counted case-insensitively. Counting only the CamelCase values (TouristAttraction, SportsAndRecreation, AmusementPlace, Garden, Park and Zoo), there are at least 6, above my floor of 5 for building a plan.
• Sight data is thin. Of the 108 sights, 77 have a stored review count, 44 have stored hours and 64 have none (59%). 55 are rated 4.0 or higher with at least 100 reviews, and 27 of those 55 have stored hours. The 100 line is mine, not a rule in the app.
• Water and tours dominate the sights. 51 of the 541 places (9%) have dive, diver, diving or scuba in the title, and so do 29 of the 108 sights (27%). West End has 18 such places among its 177 and West Bay 17 among its 136. A further 27 of the 108 sights have tour, zipline, canopy, excursion, atv or adventure in the title (25%). The title search also catches resorts with Dive in their name.
• 210 of the 541 places have stored weekly hours (39%). Of those, 53 show Sunday as closed (25%) and 23 show Monday (11%). 13 of the sights with hours show Sunday as closed.
• 79 of the 541 places (15%) have a US-style address on island coordinates. This is a data-quality marker, not a count of wrong places, because I did not check each one.
• Repeated cards disagree. The Blue Harbor Tropical Arboretum is stored with 7 AM to 4:30 PM on one card and 9 AM to 5 PM on another. Roatan Island Brewing Co has two cards with different hours for Monday, Tuesday, Friday and Saturday.
• I chose the 18 stops by hand from cards rated 4.0 or higher with at least 100 stored reviews (lowest rating 4.1, fewest reviews 136), to keep each day to one stretch of the island and fit the stored hours. 11 are sights and 7 are bars or restaurants. 15 have stored hours and 3 have none. They are not simply the highest-rated cards.
• Using straight-line distance between stored coordinates, day one totals about 7.2 km (longest leg 3.90 km, farthest pair 3.90 km), day two about 10.6 km (longest leg 3.97 km, farthest pair 8.20 km) and day three about 10.3 km (longest leg 4.89 km, farthest pair 7.61 km). The day centres are 6.6 km (day one to two), 14.9 km (two to three) and 21.0 km (one to three) apart. The stored extent inside the box runs about 37.6 km corner to corner and 33.0 km east to west (an upper bound on the farthest pair, which I did not compute).
• Weekday test: with a one-hour margin before closing, the 15 stops with stored hours pass on every weekday for day one, and on every day except Sunday for days two and three. The test script is mine and was run once on the stored values.

Limits: 541 is an upper bound on distinct places, because name variants such as Sundowners and Sundowners Beach Bar, Carambola Gardens and Carambola Botanical Gardens, or a curly apostrophe in Kristi’s Overlook survived the merge. The ratings, review counts and hours are stored values from between 11 April and 5 November 2026 that may have changed since. Tabyana Beach, the Pirates of the Caribbean Canopy Tour and Parrot Tree Plantation have no stored hours and are not weekday-tested. The suggested start times are mine and are checked only against stored hours. The box, the merge of repeats, the sight definition and the area anchors are my own definitions and were not checked card by card. I left out fees, transport, ferry and cruise information because I read no official page for them, and I did not copy any third-party review text. The Pirates of the Caribbean Canopy Tour is described only by its stored values.

Sources

• Place data: the NomadSwipe app’s stored places for the Roatán area (names, categories, ratings, review counts, addresses, coordinates and weekly hours as stored), read 7 November 2026. No third-party pages were used.