Singapore at Night with Children: How Long, and How You Get Back

The evening is the good part of the day here. The heat has come off, the walking is bearable, and most of what Singapore is famous for after dark is free. That makes it one of the easier cities in the world to take children out into at night.

It also has three specific traps, and none of them is about what to see. They are about duration, distance and what happens at the end.

The ratio nobody mentions: fifteen minutes inside four hours

Look at the two numbers together and the problem is obvious.

The light shows themselves are short. Garden Rhapsody at the Supertree Grove runs about fifteen minutes, at 7:45 pm and 8:45 pm. Spectra in front of Marina Bay Sands is about fifteen minutes, at 8 pm and 9 pm nightly, with a third show at 10 pm on Fridays and Saturdays. Wings of Time on Sentosa is roughly twenty minutes, at 7:40 pm and 8:40 pm.

The guided evenings that bundle them are three to four hours: the Starry Night Cruise is listed at 3.5 to 4.5 hours, the river cruise with both shows and hotel pick-up at four hours, the nocturnal cruise at three to four.

For an adult that is a pleasant evening with transport solved. For a five-year-old it is three and a half hours of coach, queue and wait wrapped around half an hour of the thing they came for – and there is no way out of it in the middle, because the coach is going where the coach is going.

The exception is the short one. The Singapore River Cruise is 40 minutes, from €17.41, 4.5 stars from 2,649 reviews, with sheltered seating and commentary on board. Forty minutes is a shape a small child can hold. It is also the one booking on this page we would make without hesitating.

The free version is the child-friendly version

This is not a budget argument. It is a structural one.

The outdoor gardens and the ground beneath the Supertrees at Gardens by the Bay are open 5 am to 2 am and cost nothing. Garden Rhapsody is free to watch from the grass, and it is on twice.

What that buys you with children is the ability to abandon the plan. No ticket has been paid for, nobody is waiting for you at a meeting point, and if the evening turns at 8:10 pm you simply go back to the hotel. With a booked four-hour tour, the same moment costs you the price of the tour and an hour of getting out of it.

Aim for the 7:45 pm show rather than the 8:45 pm one. It is the same show.

Night Safari: right idea, wrong hour for the youngest

Mandai’s own opening times are the useful part. The Night Safari is open 6 pm to midnight with last entry at 11:15 pm – but the tram and the walking trails do not start until 7 pm.

Arrive at 6 pm as the gates open and you have bought an hour of shops, food outlets and standing about before anything happens, which is the worst possible hour to spend with a tired child. Arrive at about 6:45 pm instead.

Mandai also states that children under 3 enter free when accompanied by an adult over 21 holding an admission ticket to the same attraction. That is their condition, quoted as they write it; confirm it against the ticket you are actually buying.

The entry ticket with tram ride is from €39.59, 4.1 stars from 603 reviews. The guided version with hotel transfers is from €58.02, 4.3 stars from 131 reviews, listed at three hours – and with children that price difference is buying the thing that actually matters, because Mandai is in the north of the island, a long way from Marina Bay and from most hotels. Getting a sleeping child home from there at 10:30 pm is the part of the evening to think about first.

Minimum ages: we are not going to invent one

The evening products in our inventory do not share a single common age limit, and the operators set their own. Some sell child tickets, some set a floor, some do neither.

The number that applies to you is on the booking page of the product you are looking at – along with whether a pram can come aboard a boat, and what happens to it while you are on the water. That is a thirty-second check and it is the only reliable one. An article that gave you a figure here would be guessing, and you would find out at the pier.

Prams, and the walk between the two shows

The bay is flat and paved, and pushing a pram along the waterfront is easy. The crossing between the Event Plaza in front of Marina Bay Sands and the Supertree Grove is the part to look at before you commit to it, because it goes round the hotel and over a bridge rather than straight across the water.

Look at the route on a map in daylight. Doing it for the first time at 8:30 pm, in a crowd, with forty-five minutes to make the next show, is where the evening goes wrong – and the shows are the one thing on this page that will not wait.

Rain is an evening problem here

The Meteorological Service records thunderstorms as most common in the afternoon and evening, and the wettest months as November to January, with December averaging around 332 mm. That is exactly the window you were planning to spend outdoors, and outdoor shows and decks stop when lightning is nearby.

Have the indoor fallback in your pocket rather than in your plans: the conservatories at Gardens by the Bay stay open until 9 pm – Flower Dome with last entry at 8:30 pm, Cloud Forest at 8 pm – and the ArtScience Museum from €19.11 is a two-minute walk from the Event Plaza.

The way back, decided before you leave

MRT services stop around midnight, and the exact last train differs by line and direction. It is posted at every station – read the board on the way in, not on the way out.

After that a taxi costs more: the midnight surcharge is 50% of the metered fare from midnight to 6 am, charged on the trip that starts inside that window. Fares are set by the taxi companies themselves rather than by a regulator, but all of them charge the same 50% – there is no cheaper operator to find at 12:20 am with two asleep children.

The practical rule is to treat the 8:45 pm Garden Rhapsody as the latest thing in the evening, not the first. An evening built backwards from a 9:15 pm departure works. One built forwards from “let’s see how it goes” ends at a taxi rank.

When an evening out is the wrong call

Honestly, some nights it is:

• The day you land. A long-haul arrival plus a four-hour night tour is a bad trade at any age, and worse with children.
• Under about four or five, for anything ticketed and long. The bay, free, for ninety minutes, is the version that works.
• The night before an early flight. Nothing here ends early enough to be worth it.
• When a thunderstorm is already sitting over the bay. The outdoor part is the whole point, and it will be closed.

Where to next

The full timetable of shows and opening hours is in Singapore after dark, and the question of fitting an evening into a short stop is covered in one evening in Singapore. If you are choosing between guided formats, see night tour: bus or boat.

Evening bookings are on our Singapore night tours page, the Mandai parks on the zoo and Night Safari page, and the boats on the river cruise page.

Opening hours, conditions and prices were taken from the operators on the date above and can change. Age limits and pram rules in particular belong to each operator, and the booking page is the only place they are binding.