Nantucket Unveiled: The Surprising Pros and Cons You Need To Know [2025 Guide]

There once was a trip to Nantucket
That I took for a few Upgraded Points ducats.
Food and bikes were both great,
But the crowds earned my hate,
And now I’m going to discuss it.

Once a whaling hub, later an old-money WASP stronghold, and now a favorite locale of limericks more coarse than mine, Nantucket — a small island off the southern coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts — remains a popular tourist destination for day-trippers, vacation renters, and summer residents.

I visited the island recently in August 2025 and came away with a few thoughts.

8 Things I Liked About Nantucket

1. Fast Ferry for the Win

The primary way to Nantucket is by ferry, particularly one that leaves from the harbor in Hyannis, Cape Cod.

There are 2 ferry types you can take: a fast one and a slow one. The slow ferry leaves a few times a day and takes 2 hours and 15 minutes. It can accommodate cars, but that’s basically the only advantage it has over the fast ferry.

The fast ferry is a catamaran that can make the same trip in an hour. You can’t take a car onto it, but you can take a bike for a small extra fee. You place your tagged bike on a bike rack on the wharf, and the dockworkers stow it in the catamaran’s hold. Then, you pick up your bike at a bike rack at the other end of the journey.

The Steamship Authority, which also runs the traditional ferry, and Hy-Line Cruises offer hourlong fast ferries to Nantucket from Hyannis, though they arrive at different wharves. We took the Hy-Line.

The ride is smooth and fast, though you’ll likely have to share seats or a table with strangers if you travel during the high season. There are upstairs and downstairs levels, with bathrooms on both of them. The seats are a combination of bus-style single seats and banquette seats with tables near the snack bar on the first floor.

On our morning ferry trip to Nantucket, we took up half a table right by the snack bar. We had breakfast, snacks, and coffee from the snack bar, played a game of counting buoys, fishing boats, and lighthouses, and were on the island in seemingly no time.

Still, the Hy-Line fast ferry ain’t pocket change. We paid $91 for each adult round-trip ticket, $55 for a round-trip ticket for a child, and $16 to take a bicycle over and back.

A great card for the ferry fare is the American Express^® Green Card, which earns 3x points on all transit purchases. Amex Membership Rewards points are among the most valuable loyalty program currencies Upgraded Points tracks, and we value them at 2.2 cents per point.

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This card can provide a great way to accumulate Membership Rewards points on eligible travel, transit, and at restaurants.

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Earn 40,000 Membership Rewards^® points after you spend $3,000 in eligible purchases on your American Express^® Green Card within the first 6 months of Card Membership.

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2. Natural Beauty

Nantucket Island is known for having done a good job of preserving its natural beauty, and it’s still a favorite for nature lovers and those seeking glimpses of its birds, visiting seals, and beautiful and occasionally delicious plant life. We spotted a man with a basket picking beach plums right off the bike path. (Cape Cod beach plums make a locally popular jelly.)

The Nantucket National Wildlife Refuge takes up 24 acres on the island’s northern tip and serves as a critical pit stop for migrating birds. But there are plenty of other national, state, and local wildlife refuges on and around the island. You can row or kayak over to Coskata-Coatue Wildlife Refuge, a haven for birds and local fauna.

3. Biking Around

Several bicycle trails radiate out over the island from Nantucket Town, totaling 35 miles of cyclist-friendly paths. One of the longer and more popular is the 6-mile trail from Nantucket Town to Madaket Beach. It goes up a couple of relatively gentle hills, winding under trees, dipping into swampland, and ending at the cozy beach that gives the trail its name.

Bicycling on Nantucket isn’t perfect, though. There’s less sun cover and far fewer convenient stops to, say, cool off with ice cream compared to the Cape Cod Rail Trail. Still, the bike trails are clearly marked, well-maintained, kept safely off vehicular roads (except in town), and a delight to ride on.

If you’re not bringing your own bikes, renting them in town is easy. Nantucket’s bike shops are clustered right next to each other on Easy Street, a few blocks from the ferry landing, and they’ll supply you with maps of the island’s bike trails. You can rent a bike for a day, a week, or longer.

4. Amazing Island Eats

There are first-rate chefs and restaurants on Nantucket to match the island’s historical association with great seafood and the fishing industry. One standout was Brotherhood of Thieves, on Broad Street, which had a casual, almost backyard-like atmosphere and impressively tasty dishes, like a delectably moist roast fluke on a rainbow confetti bowl of their version of a succotash.

The local, briny Pocomo oysters were like throwing back delicate little cups of satisfyingly pure Atlantic Ocean — genuinely memorable even in a weeklong pescavore odyssey of good oysters from Providence to Provincetown.

5. Nantucket’s Living History

Nantucket was once an integral part of the American economy, a primary source of the whale oil that kept American homes lit at night in lanterns and whale-oil candles. Whale oil burned longer, brighter, and cleaner than other sources, and was so highly sought after that the resources harvested from whales hunted by Nantucket whalers fetched high prices worldwide.

Though the whaling industry’s ecological consequences were severe and are still being felt today, Nantucket doesn’t shy away from its past but embraces it. The Nantucket Whaling Museum details the history of the island’s whaling industry. It explains how whale hunting and slaughter were conducted, and how the islanders made use of the blubber and oil. The most striking artifact is the 46-foot skeleton of a baby sperm whale hovering over a 28-foot whaleboat, the relatively tiny and fragile-looking vessel that the hunting teams of whaling crews got into to chase and harpoon the oceanic leviathans.

The museum also houses a kids play area, where they can pretend to be old-timey Nantucket grocers or merchants, use marine animal puppets to put on a show at the puppet theater, or sit and read (or be read) books about life on Nantucket or the importance of ocean life.

Nantucket Town is a living, breathing historic space, too, and you can see many of the displays of conspicuous wealth earned from the carcasses of sperm whales in the mansions lining the cobblestone streets.

Just taking a stroll around Nantucket Town can be like a journey back in history, and it can be fun to gawk at the 19th-century mansions and imagine what life was like as a whaling or shipping magnate.

6. Nautical Culture Lives On

Though the whaling industry is long dead in Nantucket, the love of the sea still lives on, and you see it everywhere you look on the island, from the personal docks stretching out behind the houses of some lucky Nantucket homeowners to the sailboats lazily circling the island to the charter boats offering whale encounters, fishing adventures, and island tours.

If you’re a fan of the sailing life, want to learn more about living on the sea, or just like to soak in those pirate-adjacent vibes, Nantucket is as good a place to do it as any.

7. Art Is Everywhere

Nantucket has had a long historic association with artists, including being home to a famed colony of artists who worked in the old fishermen’s shacks that dotted the wharf in the early 20th century.

That creative legacy survives in the art you see everywhere in Nantucket Town, from Lego mosaics snuck into the sidewalk to ballerina hippo statues in yards.

Of course, you could cement your love of Nantucket art by dropping a few thousand on a painting or sculpture at one of the art galleries in town, but much of the local art scene’s work is out there to view entirely for free, if you can find it.

8. Small, Friendly Beaches

Though the beaches are as gigantic as Cape Cod’s Marconi Beach and more akin to the oceanside town beaches on Coney Island, Nantucket’s beaches are clean, cozy, and comfortable, moderately frequented by locals and summer residents — and the occasional pod of seals or sea lions. (In that last case, do not go in the water, because sea lions are great white sharks’ favorite food.)

Beaches like Madaket are easily accessible by bicycle, meaning you don’t have to stress out about jamming your car into the tiny parking lots. In our case, the beach was the perfect way to celebrate making it to the end of the Madaket bike trail and taking a quick break before heading the same 6 miles back to Nantucket Town.

3 Things I Didn’t Like About Nantucket

1. Sky-High Prices

Though Nantucket isn’t quite the redoubt of blue-blood WASPiness it once was, many prices on the island still reflect a patrician attitude toward money. The average home price on the island is nearly $5 million, and that kind of pricing trickles down to everyday expenses like meals.

For example, at Millie’s, a restaurant, bar, and store that dominates the street by Madaket Beach, the po’boy sandwiches and most salads were $29, and even the humble kids-meal quesadilla was $15.

In comparison, my $13 clam-and-sweet-corn chowder seemed like a steal, even if it came in a shallow bowl.

Of course, Millie’s has a captive market in the Madaket Beach crowd, and you’d be naive to think they wouldn’t take advantage of it. But Nantucket Town was similarly rough on the wallet. Until recently, you could reasonably expect to pay $1 an oyster around Cape Cod. However, those delicious Pocomos were $4 a pop at Brotherhood of Thieves this summer. Totally worth it, but it was also the most I can remember paying for raw oysters anywhere, even in Manhattan.

2. Scenesters

Nantucket’s longtime reputation as an upper-crust haven has drawn even non-Kennedys to try to bask in its glamour for decades, which nowadays means the island gets its share of scenesters there to take Nantucket-y social media selfies, partake in Nantucket-y social media rituals, and generally try to role-play as Nantucket aristocrats while day-tripping on the island.

Take, for example, the lines at the Juice Bar, which is, despite the name, mostly known as an ice cream parlor. It’s become a tradition to wait in round-the-block lines for a Juice Bar cone, thanks to endlessly shared Instagram and TikTok videos showing people in round-the-block lines for a Juice Bar cone. If you’ve ever read Don DeLillo’s “White Noise,” you might start to get the creeping feeling that you’ve stumbled across the real-life red barn experience, even if the ice cream is quite good and the freshly made cones are fantastic.

In other words, Nantucket is, to a degree, famous for being famous, and that means you have to endure the kind of scene-seeking people those kinds of places attract, for better or worse.

Hot Tip:

The lines for the Juice Bar thin out considerably after the first evening ferry back to the mainland. We swung by around 5:30 p.m. and didn’t have to wait at all.

3. Crowds at Arrival and Departure

To a degree, life on the island ebbs and flows with the delivery of new people that each ferry brings to the wharf. On our 9:30 a.m. ferry trip to Nantucket in late August, many of the ferry passengers seemed to be day-trippers whose faces we recognized on the return trip later that evening. But many were also evidently summer residents, there for events, or guests of summer or permanent island residents.

The result? A glorious, crowded mess on the wharf as soon as the first ferry passengers walked off the gangway. Day-trippers suddenly stop near the bottom of the ramp and slowly gaze around as they try to get their bearings, residents greet guests in clots of welcoming well wishes that somehow take up a third of the relatively narrow Straight Wharf, and ferry workers pull through long trains of bright blue baggage carts that bisect the road and make everything even harder to maneuver around that it already is. It’s chaos, and it made me want to leave Nantucket Town immediately for something less crowded than Grand Central Terminal back in New York City.

By the time we returned for the 7 p.m. return ferry (the second to last of the day), the crowds had died down considerably — it was pretty obvious the 5:15 p.m. ferry was the most popular one to take back to Hyannis — but the lines were still long and somewhat disorganized. The wharf, at least, was now navigable by foot.

So if you take the fast ferry to Nantucket, brace for crowds on the wharf on the arrivals around 10 a.m. and earlier and departures around 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. — possibly good times to rent a bike and escape the crowds in Nantucket Town.

Final Thoughts

Though it no longer has a whaling industry, Nantucket still has cachet. But don’t go there for that. Instead, visit this historic island for its beautiful nature, delicious seafood, and culture. You will be well-rewarded.