How long every Thailand route takes.

Bangkok to Chiang Mai: sleeper or flight?

The two ways up cover the same distance and are nothing alike. The flight is about 1h20 in the air, with fares from around $45 in our August 2026 check, and door to door the planner allows about 4h20: the taxi out, check-in and bags, the taxi in at the other end. The day you fly loses its morning and keeps its afternoon, because a flight that lands before lunch does leave the afternoon for the old town.

The sleeper leaves Krung Thep Aphiwat, Bangkok’s long-distance terminal since 2023 (not Hua Lamphong), in the evening and, on time, puts you in Chiang Mai the next morning, about 13 hours later; nothing on the arrival morning should depend on the minute. A berth ran around $28 in the same check, and the berth is your bed for the night, so the fare replaces a hotel night, which at a boutique rate is the larger of the two savings. The planner treats the day the train leaves as a short one, with the evening at the station and two hours off the day’s budget for the packing and the check-out, and the day it arrives as a morning spent, with the rest of the day open.

Which to take. With eight nights or more and any liking for trains, the sleeper north and the flight back is the combination we would take: the train takes a night you would have slept anyway, and the flight home lands you in Bangkok with a day in hand. With fewer than eight nights the train’s thirteen hours are a larger share of the trip than the $17 they save, and the flight is the better call. Never plan a sleeper south to arrive on the morning of an international flight: a late train is a missed plane. On trips of eight nights or more that end outside the capital, the planner adds a Bangkok buffer night, so a sleeper south arrives the morning before the flight, and on a Pai route it keeps the flight from Chiang Mai rather than the train for exactly that reason, even for travellers who asked for trains.

Book the sleeper well ahead in high season and around Songkran and New Year, and the flight two to six weeks out, before the fare moves. Both are searchable on 12Go (partner link; we earn a small commission at no cost to you, and it changes nothing about the advice above), which is where the planner’s ticket links go, and the State Railway sells the train direct on its own site. Both figures drift, so treat them as estimates you confirm, not fares you can hold us to.

What about Bangkok to the islands?

Krabi and Phuket are short flights, about 1h20 and 1h25, in the region of $38–40. Koh Samui has its own airport at about 1h05 but costs far more, around $95, because one airline owns the runway; the night train and ferry combination lands nearer $35 and takes most of a day. Koh Tao has no airport at all: fly to Samui and take the ferry across, about 4 hours on the move for around $112, or the night train and the Lomprayah ferry, roughly 10 hours for about $32.

The pattern worth internalising: an airport makes a place cheap in hours and expensive in money, or the reverse. Nothing on this list is remote. Some of it is just slow.

Every route we have verified

These are the legs our planner uses when it builds a trip, read from the same record. Onboard is the recorded riding time of each way that has one; where a journey involves more than one mode it is the chain end to end. Door to door is that time plus the allowance the planner adds for transfers, piers, check-in and waits, shown in brackets: an hour for a road journey, plus an hour for each island end, and never less than three hours around a flight or two around a train. It is our planning rule, not a timetable, and a Railay bed adds an hour for the longtail. Fares are rough, per person, one way, and were checked in August 2026. Ferry and bus prices in particular move with season and operator, so confirm at the counter or on the operator’s own site before you count on one.

Every row has its own link (the row’s anchor, for citing one journey) and a way to see the journey inside a whole route: “Check this journey in a route” opens our free route check with the two stops filled in, and from there the planner can open the same route with every day dealt.

What this table does not cover

Only routes between the 19 places the planner currently routes appear here. If a pair is missing, it is because we have not verified a direct connection, not because one cannot exist — the planner composes those from legs we have checked, hedges the number, and tells the traveler the figure was composed from other legs.

Two limits. Seasonal boats do not run year-round: the Koh Lanta to Koh Lipe speedboat is a November-to-April service, and the direct Koh Chang to Koh Kood boat reroutes via the mainland in low season. And a flight time is not a travel time: add the airport, the transfer at each end, and, for the small island piers, the fact that the last boats often leave mid-afternoon.

The 14-night route, day by day · When to go where · Check a route you’ve sketched