Holiday Lights Tour

With us, a lights tour means one private vehicle carrying your whole party and a route around the city’s best-known displays. Those displays sit far apart, from Brooklyn side streets and Bronx parkland to Long Island’s South Shore. We fit several of them into one evening for our Christmas lights tour in New York.

The season runs from late November until early January, and you pick your favorites. Your family stays warm in the vehicle from one display to the next while our chauffeur drives.

From Your Driveway to the First Display, and the Order in Between

Since our office is in Port Jefferson Station, Suffolk County families start close to home. We also pick up in Nassau County on the way west, and at your Manhattan hotel if you are visiting the city.

If Dyker Heights and Jones Beach are both on your list, we pair them along the Belt and Southern State Parkways. Rockefeller Center and the Bronx Zoo go together on a northern route into Manhattan and the Bronx. Pairing stops by direction lets us trim highway miles from our New York Christmas lights tour.

The vehicle is yours until the last display, and you can leave spare gloves and a thermos of cocoa in the back. You can add a dinner reservation between displays too. If your family lingers in Dyker Heights, we rework the remaining stops with you right there.

You might worry that your young children will fall asleep before the display they talked about all week. We put that one first, and they doze off on the drive home.

Getting to Each Display, Stop by Stop

Here is how we reach four of the season’s best-loved light shows, and what to expect once you arrive:

• We suggest a weeknight for Dyker Heights in Brooklyn, since mid-December weekends from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. draw the heaviest crowds. Families live in these houses all year. You walk the sidewalks between 11th and 13th Avenues, and we park a block or two away.
• In recent seasons, the city has closed West 49th and West 50th Streets to cars between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Those two blocks frame the Rockefeller Center Tree. We check the current street closures for your date. Our chauffeur then stops at Sixth Avenue and 48th or 51st Street, a few minutes’ walk from the plaza.
• The lantern trails at Bronx Zoo Holiday Lights switch on at 4:30 p.m. The zoo suggests two to three hours for a full visit. We aim for the Southern Boulevard pedestrian entrance, between 183rd and 185th Streets, so the trails are lighting up as you arrive.
• You watch the whole route of Magic of Lights at Jones Beach from your seats, and our chauffeur drives the lit lanes at the show’s speed.

Closer to home, Long Island has a pair of shows for Nassau and Suffolk families:

• Tickets for LuminoCity at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow come with a timed entry window, and the hours vary by date. We pull in at the Salisbury Park Drive lot inside your window, so you start the 14-acre walk right away.
• Out east, the Riverhead Holiday Light Show fills about a mile of road at the Calverton Executive Airpark with music-synced scenes. The show admits cars and SUVs but turns away limousines and buses, so we bring our Yukon Denali or CT6 for this stop. We can tune the radio to the show’s station, so you hear the songs as the lights change outside.

From the Fifth Avenue Windows to the Lantern Trails, a Vehicle for Each

Each of these three vehicles from our fleet suits its own kind of December evening:

• For two people at the Rockefeller Center tree and the Fifth Avenue windows, our three-passenger Cadillac CT6 is the natural fit. On a crowded December night, we can bring a sedan to the Sixth Avenue corner more easily than a larger vehicle.
• At Magic of Lights, a party of five watches from the raised seats of our GMC Yukon Denali. Sitting higher than in a sedan, you see past the cars ahead.
• An office party of 12 or fewer arrives together at the zoo’s lantern trails in our Mercedes Sprinter. Coats and gift bags fit in the 12-bag luggage area, so your hands are free for photos.

We confirm the vehicle once your route is set, since some shows limit which vehicles can drive through.

Our New York Holiday Lights Tour, Cocoa in Hand

On the drive home, the thermos is empty, and the phones are full of photos from Dyker Heights and Fifth Avenue. At 365 Airport Transfer, airport runs give us our name, and in December we also plan slower evenings around the lights.

Share the displays your family loves most, and we turn them into our New York holiday lights tour. You can reach our team at (516) 588-5892 or 365airporttransferinc@gmail.com, and you can also reach us through the online form.