Lite Ferries Schedules 2026

Lite Shipping Corporation, trading as Lite Ferries, runs twenty roll-on/roll-off cargo passenger vessels out of Cebu across the Visayas and Mindanao. The range of what those twenty ships do is unusually wide, and the timetable shows it plainly.

It began with a landing craft that took four trucks

The company was founded in 1990 by Lucio E. Lim Jr., a Boholano who is still its president and chief executive. The first vessel was LCT St. Mark — 175 gross tons, room for four ten-wheeler trucks, five cars and 70 passengers — working Loon on Bohol across to Argao on Cebu. The flagship today, M/V Lite Ferry 8, carries close to 800 passengers and up to 18 trucks. That is more than eleven times the passenger capacity the company started with, on the same stretch of water.

One hour, or eighteen

The shortest crossing we hold for this operator is Dumaguete to Oslob at 60 minutes — a hop over the Tañon Strait from Negros to the southern tip of Cebu. The longest is Plaridel to Cebu at 1,080 minutes, eighteen hours from Misamis Occidental in northern Mindanao. Same operator, same class of ship, and the difference between the two is the difference between a bus ride and an overnight passage.

The spine is Cebu to Bohol

Of the 43 departures recorded here, 20 run on two Bohol crossings. Cebu to Tubigon and Tubigon to Cebu carry eight sailings each way, two hours a leg. Cebu to Tagbilaran and the return add two each, also two hours. Everything else — Dumaguete, Dipolog, Dapitan, Larena, Ormoc, Nasipit, Cagayan de Oro, Plaridel — runs once a day or less.

Coming back can take three hours longer

Most of these legs are symmetrical: Dumaguete to Dipolog is 210 minutes in both directions, Dumaguete to Dapitan 240 both ways. One is not. Jagna to Nasipit is scheduled at 300 minutes; Nasipit to Jagna at 480. If you are planning a return trip across the Bohol Sea, the outbound timing tells you nothing useful about the way home.

A crossing the company opened itself

In 2009 Lite Ferries became the first operator to link Samboan, on the south-western tip of Cebu, with Dapitan in Zamboanga del Norte. That crossing is not in our timetable. The Dapitan connection we do hold runs from Negros instead: Dumaguete to Dapitan and back, four hours each way, once a day.

Where the company sits

Since January 2016 the head office has been the Lite Port Center on M.J. Cuenco Avenue in Cebu City, roughly a hectare of former Aboitiz Land property. The company sails under the line “Sailing with a Smile”.