Thanks to Lake Michigan, the second largest Great Lake by volume, Chicago is a particularly good place to take a Valentine’s Day cruise. There are dining cruises from Chicago throughout the year, and so the city has the resources in place to offer several cruises during the Valentine’s Day weekend. We have explored all the options and distilled the details into the following guide to Valentine’s Day cruises in Chicago.
The options for Valentine’s Day cruises in Chicago basically begin and end with Entertainment Cruises, a company that has come up on a various occasions, like in our recent article about Valentine’s Day cruises in New York. Entertainment Cruises is perhaps best understood as a group of separate dining cruise companies, with each of these companies operating in at least one city along the East Coast. Spirit Cruises, which has ships in eight cities, is by far the largest, as no other company operates in that many cities, and in fact a few of the Entertainment Cruises companies only operate in one city, like Bateaux New York (which is obviously based in New York). So, Entertainment Cruises are spread across the East Coast, and these cruises take different forms (dining, sightseeing, etc.) depending on the exact company that offers them. In general, though, wherever Entertainment Cruises does business there are dining cruises, and wherever there are dining cruises there are Valentine’s Day cruises, which brings us to Chicago.
Spirit Cruises, Odyssey, and Mystic Blue, all owned by Entertainment Cruises, each offer at least one Valentine’s Day cruise. (Two other Entertainment Cruises companies, Elite Private Yacht and Seadog, also operate in Chicago, but they don’t offer Valentine’s Day cruises.) The main provider is Odyssey, which offers four cruises over Valentine’s weekend: dinner cruises on February 13th and 14th, and brunch cruises on the 14th and 15th. Mystic Blue and Spirit Cruises each offer only one cruise for Valentine’s Day dinner. The most expensive options are the three-hour dinner cruises on board the Odyssey – the dinner on the 14th costs $190.27 per person and the one on the 13th costs $135.86 per person – and the rest of the cruises are in the $80-$100 per person range, with the two-hour brunch cruises ($81.46 per person) being the cheapest. The cheapest dinner cruise is on Mystic Blue for $89.90 per person, although this cruise, like the dinner cruise with Spirit ($99.90 per person), is still three hours long. So, there are several Valentine’s Day cruises to choose from, and they vary in price, length, time, and date.
In a place like Chicago, you won’t be lacking in ways to celebrate Valentine’s Day, but sharing a meal on the water, with the Chicago night skyline in the background, strikes us as an especially romantic possibility, and Entertainment Cruises gives you plenty of different ways to do this.
