Planning Your Trip to Koh Samui

Nobody ruins a Koh Samui trip on the island. They ruin it at home, three months earlier, booking the wrong week and the one flight that turns a short hop into a full travel day.

This is the boring, load-bearing stuff. When to come, so you're not swimming in November's runoff. How many days before you've technically seen the place and start repeating beaches. How to get here without paying a full day of your holiday for the cheap flight. And the question worth settling before any of it: is Samui actually your island, or is it Phuket.

We live here, so this is the local answer, not the version written by someone who changed planes in Bangkok once. No flawless three-week itinerary you'll abandon by day two. Just the handful of decisions that actually change the trip, made for you.

Start with when to come and how long to stay. Everything else falls into place from there.