How Much Does It Cost to Go to Pig Island

The pigs on Koh Madsum are not native, not wild, and not particularly interested in tourists before breakfast. They were introduced to a small island in the Gulf of Thailand, roughly twenty minutes by longtail from the fishing pier at Thong Krut, and they have since become the reason an otherwise quiet sandbar appears on half the itineraries sold across Ko Samui. Understanding how much does it cost to go to pig island starts with recognising that the island and the journey are priced separately, by different parties, for different reasons. The first cost is the island's own. It is a fixed, per-person conservation charge collected at the beach, and it is the same whether a visitor arrives on a shared speedboat with forty others or on a chartered longtail with two. It funds waste removal and animal welfare on a landmass with no permanent village, no municipal services and no freshwater supply of its own. Nothing about that figure changes by season, day of the week or hour of arrival — a useful anchor, because almost every other number attached to a Koh Madsum trip does move. The second cost is transport, and it is where the spread lives. A seat on a group departure from Bang Rak or Thong Krut sits at one end. A private longtail charter, negotiated at the pier, sits somewhere in the middle. A Koh Madsum private boat tour that bundles Koh Tan snorkelling, gear, fruit and a skipper who waits while guests swim sits at the other. The island fee is a rounding error inside any of them. That structure explains why quoted prices for a Ko Samui island tour vary so widely online without anyone being dishonest. One operator quotes the boat alone. Another quotes boat plus snorkel equipment plus the entry charge. A third quotes a half-day with lunch at Koh Tan's fringing reef included. Reading a price without knowing which components sit inside it is the most common way visitors end up comparing figures that were never comparable. The practical move is to ask what the quote covers before comparing it to anything else — specifically whether the conservation fee, snorkelling gear and any national park charges elsewhere in the itinerary are inside or outside the headline number. Season matters too, though indirectly. The Gulf of Thailand is calmest for Samui's southern crossings through much of the year, but the late-year monsoon window can cancel sailings outright, and cancelled sailings push demand — and price — onto the days that do run. Sea conditions, not the island, dictate whether the trip happens at all. Small boats from Thong Krut handle the short hop well in flat water and poorly in swell. Anyone still asking how much does it cost to go to pig island should treat the answer as a floor plus a choice: a fixed, modest landing charge that nobody avoids, and a transport decision that can be made cheaply on a shared hull or comfortably on a private one. The dedicated pricing and getting-there sections on this site break down each component, and the booking pages show which real departures are currently running from Ko Samui's southern piers.