Ten Minutes From the Airport: Your First and Last Hours on Samui

Samui airport is not like other airports. It is open-air, low-rise and set in gardens, and you walk from the plane through what looks like a resort. People take photographs of it, which is not a normal thing to do at an airport.

It is also ten minutes from the middle of Bangrak, and that proximity solves three problems most visitors do not think about until they are in the middle of one.

The gap between checkout and your flight

This is the common one. Checkout is at eleven, your flight is at six, and you have seven hours, a suitcase and nowhere to be.

The usual answer is to sit in a hotel lobby or go to the airport early, both of which are a waste of a day on an island.

The better answer, if you are anywhere on the north-east coast, is Bangrak. You are ten minutes from departures, which means you can stay somewhere pleasant until an hour before your flight rather than three.

Most places along the beach road will keep a bag behind the counter if you are eating or drinking there. Ask rather than assume.

What works for a long final afternoon: a table at one of the beachfront places with the bay in front of you, an hour somewhere air conditioned through the worst of the heat, and a last walk on the sand. Then a ten-minute ride to the terminal.

Late arrivals

Samui takes flights into the evening, and if you land at ten or eleven at night the island is already winding down.

Chaweng is around twenty minutes away in traffic. Lamai is closer to forty-five minutes. Bangrak is ten minutes, and that difference matters a great deal when you have been travelling all day.

What is open when you land late: 7-Eleven, twenty-four hours, and genuinely useful for water, a SIM card and anything you forgot. A small number of bars. And us, until two in the morning.

What is not open: everything else. If you want food, eat at the airport or accept 7-Eleven. Plan for that rather than discovering it.

Early departures

The reverse problem. A seven in the morning flight means leaving Chaweng at half past five, in the dark, hoping your driver turns up.

From Bangrak it is a twenty-minute problem instead of a ninety-minute one, and Grab is reliable enough at that hour on this side of the island.

If you have an early flight and any flexibility about where you spend the last night, spending it in Bangrak is the single easiest improvement you can make to the trip.

The planes

Flights come in low over Bangrak Bay on their approach, close enough to read the airline on the tail. On a clear evening they pass over the water every few minutes.

This sounds like a strange thing to watch and it is one of the genuinely nice features of the area. JUZE, at the eastern end of the bay, has the best seats for it, with the Big Buddha on one side and the flight path in front.

If you are killing time before a flight, watching other people's flights arrive is a better way to spend it than a departure lounge.

Practical notes on the airport itself

It is small. Check-in, security and boarding take far less time than a mainland airport, and arriving three hours early is unnecessary. Ninety minutes is comfortable for domestic, two hours for international.

It is open air, which means it is warm. Do not dress for an air-conditioned terminal.

There are shops and cafes airside and they are more expensive than anywhere in Bangrak, which is the usual airport arrangement.

Departure is by shuttle buggy from the terminal to the aircraft, which is part of the charm.

What to do with two spare hours

Not enough time for the beach, too much for the terminal.

Wat Phra Yai, the Big Buddha, is ten minutes away and takes twenty to thirty minutes to visit. Free, and it is the last thing on the island a lot of people wish they had seen.

Wat Plai Laem is ten minutes in the other direction and quieter.

Coffee on the beach road. Flo opens at eight and closes at eight, which covers most flight times.

Any of the three works, and all of them beat sitting still.

Where we fit

We are on the beach road in the middle of Bangrak, ten minutes from the terminal, open from ten in the morning until two the following morning.

That makes us useful at both ends of a trip: somewhere to land after a late flight when the rest of the island has closed, and somewhere to spend the last few hours that is not an airport.

We are a licensed medical cannabis dispensary with a cafe and lounge attached. If you are simply looking for a comfortable place to sit near the airport with a working plug and a bay view, that also works.

One thing worth saying plainly, because people ask: nothing bought in Thailand under a medical cannabis prescription can be taken out of the country. Not in checked luggage, not in hand luggage, not to a country where it is legal at home. There is no permit for it. Finish it or leave it.