Koh Chang Itineraries: 3, 5 and 7 Days

At a glance

A day trip from Bangkok buys you four hours on a beach for eighteen hours of your life

People ask this every week, so here is the arithmetic.

The road leg from Bangkok to Ao Thammachat pier is 4 to 4.5 hours' driving, and five hours is the number to plan against once the Chonburi corridor and one stop for fuel and a toilet are in it. Chapter 1 has the distances and where the time goes.

Then the ferry. The crossing itself is short, 25 to 35 minutes, but the wait is the part that varies: everything between the first and last sailing leaves when the boat is full, so a mid-morning crossing might go within twenty minutes or might sit for an hour.

Then the island leg. Ao Sapparot pier is on the north-east coast and every beach worth visiting is on the west, so there is a further 20 to 45 minutes by songthaew before your feet touch sand.

Run the clock forward on the best possible version of this day:

That is 18 hours and 20 minutes for 4 hours 25 on a beach, and it only works if nothing goes wrong. Miss the 17:45 and your fallback is the 18:30, the last boat of the day. Miss that one and you are booking a room on the island at eight in the evening, which is a worse outcome than not coming.

The comparison that settles it: Pattaya is two hours from Bangkok and Hua Hin is three, both with no ferry in the equation. If you have one free day, spend it at one of those. Koh Chang is a trip you sleep on.

Three days is the shortest trip that repays the journey

Three nights gives you two full days on the island either side of a travel-in and a travel-out. That is enough for one beach day and one boat day, which is the core of what Koh Chang does well. It is not enough for the interior as well — do not try to fit Klong Plu waterfall into a three-day trip that also has a boat day in it, because you will spend the third morning packing instead.

Book accommodation on Klong Prao or Kai Bae for a trip this short. Both sit mid-island, which cuts the songthaew time at each end and keeps you close to the Bang Bao pier where the boats leave from. Chapter 2 works through which beach suits you.

Day 1 — arrival

An early start matters more than it looks. Leave Bangkok at 07:00 and you land on the island with the afternoon intact. Leave at 11:00 and you arrive at the pier around 16:00, cross on a boat that may or may not fill quickly, and reach your room after dark having seen nothing. Leave later still and you are on the 17:45 or the 18:30, which docks at Ao Sapparot about 19:05, after the last scheduled songthaew — that means a pier pickup arranged with your resort and priced in baht before you leave Bangkok, which is your own arrangement and not part of a mainland transfer (Chapter 1 sets out the cut-offs).

Day 2 — the boat day

Do the boat day second, not third. If the sea is rough or the trip is cancelled, you still have a day in hand to move it to.

Know what you are buying. A full-day wooden-boat trip is eight to nine hours long and puts you in the water for roughly two to three hours of it across three or four stops. The rest is transit — Koh Rang is well over an hour out from Bang Bao. The fish life is good and the coral is patchy, much of it bleached. Chapter 4 has the state of the coral and the marine park fee that the rangers collect on the water, which is not included in the trip price you were quoted.

If two to three hours in the water inside a nine-hour day does not appeal, take a speedboat half-day instead, or skip the boat entirely and spend the day on the beach. On a three-day trip, a bad boat day is half your holiday.

Day 3 — beach, then out

Five days is where Koh Rang and the interior both fit

Five nights is the version most people should book. It absorbs one washout day without wrecking the trip, and it has room for the two things a three-day visit has to choose between.

Days 1 and 2 run as above. Then:

Day 3 — inland

Go to Klong Plu early, before the tour groups — it is the island's most visited waterfall, and the morning is the part of this day worth protecting. Chapter 5 has the fees and which falls are a trickle by February; it also notes that nobody has paced the walk in from the car park, so treat the walking figure in the table as approximate.

Note the season. From roughly February to April the smaller falls dry up and Klong Plu is the only reliably wet one. If you are visiting in March and the waterfall day is the one you were most looking forward to, reorder the trip and put a second beach or boat day here instead.

Than Mayom is an add-on, not a fixture. One national park ticket covers Klong Plu and Than Mayom on the same day, and that shared ticket is most of the argument for going, because the falls themselves are modest. Against it: the drive from Klong Prao is roughly 40 minutes each way — an estimate from the road distance rather than a measured run — and with no road across the south of the island it is an out-and-back over the ridge rather than a loop (Chapter 6). Two things to settle before you give it half a day. A Trat provincial announcement referenced a restoration closure of Than Mayom waterfall and its campground, and it has not been possible to establish whether that closure is still in force. And the opening hours are disputed: 08:00 to 17:00 in the local guides against 09:00 to 16:30 on the national parks site, so do not plan on being through the gate before 09:00. Chapter 5 carries both caveats and the park office number to ring before you commit. If it turns out to be shut, or you would rather not spend eighty minutes in a car, stay on the west coast and run the day in the table above — Klong Plu in the morning, the Kai Bae viewpoint and a beach you have not used in the afternoon. You lose nothing by it.

Day 4 — the unscheduled day

Leave it empty on purpose. Not as filler — as insurance.

Koh Chang gives you a specific set of reasons to need a spare day: the boat trip you booked gets cancelled for weather, the sea is too churned up to snorkel, you get a day of rain that makes the whole island grey, or you simply want a second go at the one beach you liked. An itinerary with no slack turns each of those into a loss.

If nothing has gone wrong, the good uses of a free day are a second beach you have not seen, a half-day trip to Koh Wai rather than a full day at Koh Rang, or an idle day where you read something. Do not book anything into it in advance.

Day 5 — out

Run Day 3 of the three-day plan, adjusted for your flight. The next section covers that adjustment.

Seven days earns an overnight on Koh Mak or Koh Kood

At seven nights the trip changes shape: you stop day-tripping and start island-hopping. Nights 1 to 4 on Koh Chang as above, then two nights on a second island, then back.

Which of the two neighbours you take depends on what you want from the second island.

Koh Mak is flat, small, quiet and easy to get around. An hour from Bang Bao by catamaran. Two nights is plenty and you will see most of it. It also works as a day trip if you would rather not move hotels — an early boat gives roughly three to four hours ashore, a figure that comes from traveller reports rather than an operator schedule, so confirm your return sailing before you walk away from the jetty (Chapter 4).

Koh Kood is bigger and more spread out than Koh Mak, and dearer for the same standard of room. It does not work as a day trip. The scheduled timetables land you and turn straight around; one catamaran arrives at Ao Salad at 10:30 and departs again at 11:00. Doing Koh Kood and back in one day means chartering a private speedboat at somewhere around 15,000 THB (about US$455), which is a poor use of the money on any budget. If you want Koh Kood, sleep there. Chapter 4 has the sailings, the fares and the charter bands, all of them season-dated.

Two constraints decide whether this leg is possible at all.

The first is the season. The direct wooden boats and speedboats between Koh Chang and its neighbours stop for the rainy season, and the one year-round service thins out. On the 2026 dates, the Kai Bae speedboat did not run from 1 May to 31 October, the Koh Chang Express did not run from 1 June to 30 September, and the Boonsiri catamaran dropped to a single 13:00 sailing across the same June-to-September window. That single afternoon sailing changes the whole plan: you cannot go over in the morning and you cannot come back before lunch. Treat those dates as the shape of a typical year rather than a fixture — each operator sets its own suspension window per season, they are published late, and the dates for the season beginning November 2026 were not out when this was written.

The second is the last leg home. Do not put the return from Koh Mak or Koh Kood on the same day as your flight. The inter-island boat, the mainland ferry and the road to Bangkok is three sequential connections, two of which are weather-dependent. Sleep the last night back on Koh Chang, near the north end, and leave yourself one clean morning. That is why the plan above is seven nights and eight days, not seven days.

Three variants worth reordering the plan for

The skeleton above suits most people. Three groups should change it.

Couples

Cut the full-day shared boat and put the money into a half-day speedboat or a Koh Wai trip instead. The nine-hour wooden-boat day is a good-value group activity and a mediocre one for two people who wanted a quiet day. That frees an afternoon, which is better spent on the southern end of Klong Prao or at the quieter northern tip of White Sand than on the deck of a hundred-passenger boat.

For dinner, the Bang Bao pier restaurants are built out over the water and are dearer than the equivalent meal elsewhere on the island. Salak Kok, over on the east side, is a village-run alternative with the same seafood — but it is an out-and-back drive over the ridge with no evening songthaew home, so plan the transport before you plan the meal. Chapter 7 covers both.

Families with young children

Two changes. First, base yourself near the northern end of whichever west-coast beach you pick: the northern end of each bay holds both deeper water and wider sand. Which half of the day is swimmable then depends on the tide, which varies by month — Chapter 2 has the pattern and why you should check a Trat tide table against your own dates before booking.

Second, drop the full-day boat trip for children under about eight. Eight to nine hours on a boat for two hours in the water is a hard sell at that age. Substitute a half-day speedboat, or a beach day and the Klong Plu waterfall, where the walk in is short and well made and there is a pool to swim in at the end.

One thing to plan around rather than into: rip currents run off all the west-coast beaches and lifeguards are only sometimes on duty, so treat a red flag as a closed beach (Chapter 7 has the detail and the recorded incidents).

One more, since children will ask: there is no observation-only elephant project on Koh Chang — every camp currently operating on the island offers riding. Chapter 5 sets out the position and where the genuine sanctuaries are, all of which are off the island.

Divers

Build five nights, not three, and put two dive days in with a day between them. The local sites are 30 to 40 minutes out; the Koh Rang marine park sites are about 90 minutes, so a Koh Rang dive day is a full day where a local one is not. The HTMS Chang wreck is the reason most people come, and it divides by certification: Open Water gets you the top of the tower and the upper structure, while the main deck and below needs Advanced. Book the wreck for the earlier of your two dive days so there is room to repeat it if the first one is silty.

Visibility here is modest by Andaman standards, and the trade is a season one — Koh Chang dives year round from sheltered moorings while the Andaman parks shut for the monsoon (Chapter 4 has the sites, depths, visibility figures and operators). What that buys the plan is a dive season running November to May, a few weeks longer at each end than the snorkelling-trip season, because the shops will go out from those moorings in weather that cancels a wooden boat.

The itinerary consequence divers most often miss is at the end. The standard guidance taught by the major agencies is a surface interval of at least 18 hours after repetitive or multi-day diving before flying — shorter intervals are quoted for a single dive, so confirm the number with your own operator rather than working from this one. The five-hour drive to Bangkok is at sea level and does not count against you — the flight does. So your last dive needs to finish the morning of the day before an evening flight, not the day of it. In practice that means the final full day on the island is a beach day, not a dive day.

Departure day is the day you plan backwards from

The flight home is the fixed point. Everything else on the last day moves to accommodate it, and the ferry is the piece with the least give in it — not because it is slow, but because a mid-morning boat leaves when it fills rather than on the clock (Chapter 1 has the timetable and the two sailings that are exceptions). Most of the time that is quick. On a wet Tuesday in low season it is not.

Work back from the flight in four blocks: three hours at the airport for an international departure, five hours on the road, one hour for the ferry crossing and the wait around it, and 20 to 45 minutes from your beach to Ao Sapparot. That is nine to ten hours from beach to boarding gate.

Worked example, for a 21:00 international departure from Suvarnabhumi:

That leaves 2 hours 40 at the airport, which is the right amount of slack — enough for a genuine hold-up in the ferry queue or a bad stretch of motorway, not so much that you have wasted a morning. Run the same arithmetic forward for an early-morning flight and it does not close: an outbound departure before about 13:00 cannot be caught from Koh Chang on the day. Sleep in Bangkok, Pattaya or Trat the night before instead.

Two smaller things about the last day. The last scheduled songthaew runs around 17:00, with one source stretching it to 17:45 (Chapter 6), so an evening departure needs a vehicle arranged in advance rather than one flagged from the road. And carry enough cash for the ferry ticket — you cannot pay for it by card.

A private car changes the shape of the arrival and departure days rather than the price of them. On the way in, you leave when you choose instead of when the bus does, you do the whole road leg in one vehicle with your luggage in it, and you arrive at the pier as a walk-up foot passenger with a known arrival time — which is what lets you aim at a specific sailing instead of hoping. On the way out, the same thing in reverse: the car meets you at the mainland pier when your boat lands, so the ferry queue is the only variable left between you and the airport. What the transfer does not cover is the crossing itself or the leg from Ao Sapparot to your beach; those are bought separately on the day, and the pricing and vehicle sizes are on the booking page.

Keep reading

• Start of the guide: Getting to Koh Chang: Piers, Ferries and Real Travel Times — the road and ferry legs every itinerary above is built on
• Arrival and departure days are the two that a fixed pickup time actually changes: book a Bangkok–pier transfer

Last updated: 2026-08-29. Ferry and pier notes come from Smile Taxi Service drivers running Bangkok-Trat transfers.