Kerala Honeymoon Planning | The Houseboat Everyone Books Wrong

The boat everyone books wrong

We book more Kerala honeymoons than any other Indian trip, and we hear both versions when people come home.

The good version and the disappointed version differ by one decision, and it is always the same one: the houseboat.

Here is the honest description that nobody gives you before you pay.

The overnight barge at Alappuzha is the famous thing. A converted rice barge, a bedroom, a cook, a sunset. It is genuinely pleasant. But there are an enormous number of them now, and the large ones draw too much water to enter the narrow canals. So they spend the day out on the wide lake sections, where the view is water, distant palms, and the boat in front of you.

Couples book it expecting the thing in the photographs: canals two boats wide, houses on the bank, village life at arm's length. That is not what a barge can deliver, because a barge does not fit down there. Ask us to build a Kerala honeymoon.

What to book instead

A day canoe, or a small punted boat, through the village canals.

This is where the backwaters people actually live: canals barely two boats wide, past houses, ducks, women washing clothes, children going to school by ferry, toddy tappers up the palms. Silent, because there is no engine. Close enough to say good morning.

It is the thing you imagined when you booked the barge, and it costs a fraction.

A shikara, the small motorboat, is the compromise: more range than a canoe, more access than a barge.

Our honest recommendation, and our things to do in Kochi page argues it at length: do the canoe, and add a houseboat night only if a night on a boat is itself the appeal. Some couples want exactly that, and there is nothing wrong with it. Just book it knowing what it is.

Nobody who has done the canals in a canoe has told us they wished they had been on a bigger boat.

The shape that works

Kerala honeymoons work in three parts, and the failure mode is trying to do four.

Part one: Fort Kochi, two nights. Land, adjust, walk. It is the gentlest landing in India after a long flight: shaded lanes, no traffic, a ferry, and nobody shouting at you. Kathakali one evening, with the makeup from the start, which is where the fascination is. Our Kochi travel guide covers it.

Part two: the middle. Either the backwaters (the canoe, and a night somewhere on the water), or the hills at Munnar, which is a few hours east and a completely different climate: cool, green, tea to the horizon, and a genuine relief after the coast.

If you have ten days, do both. If you have seven, pick one, and it is the single most useful decision on this page. Doing both in a week means the winding drive to Munnar eats a day at each end and you spend your honeymoon in a car.

Part three: a beach to finish. Varkala or Marari, and the point is to stop moving. A honeymoon that ends with a transfer is a holiday that ends badly.

Each part wants a different kind of property, which is why booking one hotel chain across the trip rarely works here. Fort Kochi is heritage homestays and converted merchant houses, and the good ones are small enough to sell out months ahead. Alappuzha is where the backwater properties and houseboat operators are based. Munnar is plantation bungalows and hillside resorts, where the view from the room is most of what you are paying for. And the far south around Kovalam and Thiruvananthapuram is where the beach-and-Ayurveda resorts cluster, which is also the easiest end to fly home from.

Kochi stays Backwater stays Munnar stays Kovalam stays

A word on the sequencing: book the middle leg first, because the good backwater and plantation properties are the scarce ones, then fit Kochi and the beach around it. Send us the dates and we will price the flights around whichever shape you land on, including the open-jaw version that flies you home from Thiruvananthapuram instead of doubling back to Kochi.

The monsoon question, honestly

This is where we go against the obvious advice, and it is worth hearing.

October to March is the reliable window. Dry, warm, everything open. The southwest monsoon lands on this coast before anywhere else in India, from around June, and it is serious rain rather than a shower. April and May are hot and sticky without the relief.

So the standard advice is: do not honeymoon in the monsoon.

But consider what a honeymoon actually is. If your trip is a beautiful property, a spa, long meals and each other, the monsoon is genuinely underrated: the state is absurdly green, the prices fall a long way so the same money buys a considerably better property, the crowds are gone, and the rain arrives in dramatic bursts rather than grey days.

What the monsoon takes is the boats and the beach. If those are the honeymoon, go in the dry season. If the property is the honeymoon, we would book the monsoon and not apologise for it.

And there is a Kerala-specific twist: the Ayurvedic tradition holds that the humid season is when treatment works best, so the clinics fill while the tourists leave. That is a long-standing local view rather than marketing.

The Ayurveda trap

Related, and worth being clear about because it is sold hard.

A one-hour Ayurvedic massage is a nice massage. It is a spa treatment.

Genuine Ayurvedic treatment is a course: typically one to two weeks, prescribed after a consultation, with a diet and a daily routine attached. It is medicine rather than pampering, and it is excellent.

It is also, and we say this gently, not a honeymoon. A fortnight of prescribed diet and early nights is a wonderful thing and it is not what most couples flew here for.

Know which one you are booking. Kerala does both superbly and the resorts are frequently vague about which is which.

Getting there, and the transfer nobody budgets for

There is no non-stop from Australia. Our flights to India page covers the corridor, and the routings that work are Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Colombo or the Gulf, which has an unusually deep Kerala network for the straightforward reason that a large Keralan community has worked there for generations.

The thing to budget for: Cochin International sits well north of the city, and the transfer to Fort Kochi typically runs to somewhere near an hour and a half. That is not a taxi ride, it is a leg, and arranging the driver before you fly beats negotiating one at the kerb after fifteen hours.

And the construction worth asking about: an open jaw, into Bengaluru and home from Kochi, or into Kochi and home from Chennai. It removes a backtrack, and our multi-city flights guide explains why a search box cannot build it.

The timing

Four to five months for December to February, which is peak and collides with the Australian summer holidays.

Two to three months for the shoulders.

The reason honeymoons need more lead time than the fare suggests: the properties worth having are small. A backwater or hill property with a dozen rooms fills in a way a city hotel does not, and the good ones go first regardless of what the flights are doing.

Tell us it is a honeymoon

Genuinely. Airlines and hotels are considerably kinder to occasions than their booking engines suggest, it costs nothing to flag, and it works more often than people expect.

We do it as a matter of course when we know. We cannot do it when we do not.

Send us your honeymoon dates and a consultant will reply within 2 business hours with the flights priced, the transfer flagged, the canoe booked instead of the barge, and the occasion mentioned to everyone who should hear about it.