Working Remotely From Koh Samui: An Honest Guide

Koh Samui is not the obvious choice for remote work in Thailand. Chiang Mai has the community, Bangkok has the infrastructure, and both have coworking spaces you could drop into anywhere in the world and recognise.

Samui has a smaller, quieter version of that, and something neither of them has, which is that you can finish a call and be in the sea eleven minutes later.

We run a cafe in Bangrak where people work all day, so we watch this closely. Here is what we have learned about doing it here properly.

The time zone is the first thing to sort out

Thailand is UTC+7, and it does not observe daylight saving, which means your overlap with everywhere else shifts twice a year without you doing anything.

With Europe, you are five to seven hours ahead. A 9am start in London is 3pm or 4pm here. That gives you a genuinely excellent morning: five or six hours of nobody contacting you, then a normal European working afternoon.

With the US east coast, you are eleven to twelve hours ahead, which is close to a straight inversion. Their morning is your late evening. This is workable but it is the reason places open past midnight matter here.

With Australia, you are three to four hours behind Sydney, which is the easiest of the three and barely needs managing.

The mistake people make is arriving without deciding which of these their day is built around. Samui punishes that more than a city does, because the good hours here are the early ones and you cannot casually recover them at 9pm.

The seasons matter more than you expect

December to February is dry, bright and busy. Cafes fill up. Getting the table you want means arriving before nine.

July and August are the second high season, hot and mostly clear, with a similar crowd.

October and November are the wet months, and they are quietly the best time to work here. The rain arrives in bursts rather than settling in, the tourist crowd thins out, and every cafe has free tables. If you have any control over when you come, come then.

March to May is the hottest stretch. Air conditioning stops being a preference.

What to look for in a place to work

After watching a lot of people try to work in a lot of cafes, four things separate the good ones from the photogenic ones.

Power at the table, not power somewhere in the room. A cafe with two sockets behind the counter is a two-hour cafe.

Somewhere with air conditioning and somewhere without. You want the choice. Working outside is lovely at eight in the morning and impossible at one in the afternoon.

A view that is not directly into the sun. Beachfront cafes face west or north on this island and screens become unreadable at predictable times of day.

Closing time. This is the one people forget. Most cafes in Bangrak and Fisherman's Village close between five and six in the evening, which is exactly when the European working day is getting going.

Where to work in Bangrak

The Local Coffee & Eatery is the most complete option on this stretch. It sits directly on the beach, with an indoor air-conditioned room and outdoor tables a couple of metres from the water. Open eight to five. It is the best morning-through-afternoon setup in the area and it fills up, so arrive early in high season.

Flo Coffee Roaster roasts its own beans and stays open until eight, which gives it a longer runway than most. Better coffee than it needs to be.

Sunny Cafe Viewpoint opens at half past seven, which makes it the answer for a genuinely early start, and the menu leans healthy if you are trying not to eat fried rice for the fourth day running.

Parroty Cafe is good for a working breakfast and is dog friendly.

Coworking on the island

Samui does have dedicated coworking, and it is a different proposition from the cafes: a desk you can leave things on, meeting rooms, and other people doing the same thing as you.

It is worth it if you are here for a month or more, if you take calls that need a door, or if you want the social side, which is the thing Samui is genuinely worse at than Chiang Mai. It is not worth it for a week.

The honest comparison is that cafe-working here is better than cafe-working in most places, and coworking here is worse than coworking in Chiang Mai. Which of those matters more depends entirely on how long you are staying.

Connectivity

Connection speeds in the developed parts of the island are generally good, and most cafes and accommodation in Bangrak, Bophut, Chaweng and Lamai are set up for it. Mobile data is good and cheap, and a local SIM with a generous data allowance costs very little.

Two practical notes. Power cuts happen, particularly in the wet season, usually brief. And if your work genuinely cannot tolerate a dropped connection, tether as a backup rather than assuming the cafe wifi will hold.

Where to take a call

This is the most common problem and the least discussed. Beach cafes are loud in a way that does not show up in photographs: wind, waves, and hard surfaces. A place that is pleasant to sit in can be unusable on video.

What works: indoor rooms with soft furnishings, tables away from the water, and early mornings before the room fills. What does not: any outdoor table with wind, and anywhere with a road behind it.

If you have a call that matters, go somewhere twenty minutes before it and test the room.

Where we fit

We run Chillom on the beach road in Bangrak. It is a licensed medical cannabis dispensary with a cafe and lounge attached, and a substantial share of the people in it on any given afternoon are working.

Two things make it useful for that. We are open from ten in the morning until two in the morning, which covers the whole US-facing evening that the other cafes here do not. And nobody will move you along. People sit for six hours and that is what the room is for.

There is fast wifi, power, air conditioning inside, and shaded tables outside facing the bay with the Big Buddha above it.

The short version

Samui rewards an early start, punishes an unplanned one, and is at its best for working in the months everyone else avoids.

Bangrak has better options for this than its reputation suggests, and the constraint that catches people out is not wifi or power. It is that almost everything closes at six.