Thailand forum

trixieb,

when we were there in july, we took the air asia flight from bangkok to surat thani. good flight. at the airport in surat there was a counter immediately to the right as you came out of the baggage claim area that sold combo bus/ferry tickets to both samui and phangan. if i remember, the cost was something like 400B for the combo ticket to phangan (sorry, but we went to samui so i don't exactly remember the price). it seems like you could buy just a ticket to the pier, but there wasn't a price break/advantage to do that.

on the day we went, we all loaded into one bus, and then the people going to phangan changed to a different bus once we arrived in town. it was off season then, so perhaps you'll have direct service or more options this time of year.

hopefully someone else has gone more recently and can give more up-to-date info. in any case, it was pretty straight-forward and easy to arrange (albeit a bit pricey all things considered). they pretty much waited for everyone to buy their service before departing the airport.

i can't say how long the folks had to wait to board a ferry to phangan, but the samui-bound travellers pretty much got right on the ferry once the bus arrived at the pier.

one last thing. our luggage was loaded into a room/compartment on the bus to the ferry. sometime during the trip, we saw a guy get out of that compartment and leave the bus with a small bag over his shoulder. there was no other reason for this person to be in the baggage compartment than to be going through people's baggage, so be even more careful than usual about leaving anything valuable/can't live with in your bags on the bus trip.

i hope that helps. cheers.