Koh Samui Airport

Updated 28th Aug 2026

Departures from Koh Samui Airport at a glance

• 48flights a day5th busiest of 30 airports
• 5routes from here
• 1airline
• 06:00 – 21:00first and last00061218

Collected 2 September 2026. Not live — check with the airline before booking.

Samui International Airport (USM), on Koh Samui, Surat Thani, is owned by an airline. Bangkok Airways built it, owns it and operates it, unlike the airports Airports of Thailand (AOT) runs elsewhere in the country; AOT's own site does not cover Samui at all.

Bangkok Airways groups Samui with Sukhothai and Trat as its boutique airports, the airline's term for the three it owns and not a description of the buildings. Day-to-day operation sits with Bangkok Airport Management Company Limited, a Bangkok Airways company named as the manager on the airport's own site.

Who owns and runs Samui Airport

Bangkok Airways describes Samui as a standard commercial airport operated by Bangkok Airways Public Company Limited, on its own page for the airport. The airline called Samui Thailand's first privately-owned airport in a July 2022 investor statement.

Bangkok Airways is both the airport's owner and its main airline.

The airport opened on 25 April 1989. Records differ on when building work started, giving either 1982 or 1984.

The open-sided terminals at Samui Airport

Bangkok Airways' own account of the airport it built describes two open-sided terminals, with a lot of the facilities outdoors and only a few indoor rooms, the airport offices among them. The airline describes an open-air terminal with a thatched roof, wooden pillars, and landscaped gardens running through the site. It calls the result a tropical resort-style design, combining contemporary Thai architecture with Polynesian-inspired elements.

Third-party listings describe domestic and international flights being handled separately, with check-in and baggage reclaim shared between them, and put the two terminals about 50 metres apart. Accounts of how many buildings stand on the site do not agree with each other.

You reach the terminal from the aircraft by what Bangkok Airways calls an open-air passenger tram, driving between the palm trees. With the terminals open-sided and a lot of the facilities outdoors, a good part of an arrival happens in the open air.

Capacity at Samui Airport, and the work due by 2027

Two capacity figures circulate. Bangkok Airways' 2022 investor material puts the airport's design capacity at about six million passengers a year. Trade-press reporting on the current expansion gives six million as the level the work is meant to reach, up from about two million now, which reads as passengers actually handled.

That expansion is reported by trade press including Aviation Week and Pattaya Mail, attributed to Bangkok Airways' president: seven gates becoming eleven, ten new check-in counters, and the commercial area growing from 1,800 to 4,000 square metres. Construction was reported as starting in 2025 and finishing in 2027.

Where you can fly from Samui Airport

This site holds schedule pages for five routes out of Samui, which is a shorter list than the airport's full network:

• Koh Samui to Bangkok
• Koh Samui to Phuket
• Koh Samui to Chiang Mai
• Koh Samui to Krabi
• Koh Samui to Pattaya

All five are Bangkok Airways routes, and the return legs have their own pages, starting with Bangkok to Koh Samui. Flying to and from the island is treated at more length in the Koh Samui flights guide.

Which Bangkok airport does Bangkok Airways use for Samui?

Bangkok Airways is listed as serving Samui from both of Bangkok's airports, Suvarnabhumi (BKK) and Don Mueang (DMK), so check the three-letter code on your booking rather than the city name. Suvarnabhumi and Don Mueang are two different airports, and a booking that says Bangkok does not tell you which one you are using.

International flights from Samui Airport

Route listings give Bangkok Airways two international destinations from Samui, Hong Kong and Singapore. Scoot, part of the Singapore Airlines group, started its own Singapore route on 13 May 2024.

Berjaya Air has linked Samui with Subang, near Kuala Lumpur, since 22 April 2026, and accounts differ on what the service is. The airline's own announcement of 11 March 2026 calls these its first international routes, while ch-aviation describes all-business-class charters three times a week, May to December.

Chengdu Airlines resumed a route from Chengdu on 5 March 2023, and current route listings show no airline operating it now. Assume it has gone unless you find the airline saying otherwise; that evidence is a search result, not a page we could open in full. SilkAir, which older listings still name here, no longer exists: its Samui flights stopped in March 2020, and the airline was absorbed into Singapore Airlines in May 2021.

Getting to and from Samui Airport

Third-party guides put the airport about 2 km north of Chaweng, and about 20 km from Nathon, the island's administrative centre. Shared minivans, taxis and private cars are the usual onward options besides a hire car. The island itself is covered in the Koh Samui destination guide.

By hire car

The airport's own car rental page names Drive Car, Budget Car Rental, Sixt Rent A Car, ASAP, Europcar Rental, SmackOne and Thai Rent A Car. Only the Thai Rent A Car entry carries a location and hours, Arrival Hall Gate No 4 and 08:00 to 20:00 every day; the others give contact details alone, and the address shown for Europcar is a Bangkok head office. Two blocks on that page are still placeholder text and its footer reads 2015, so read the list as a starting point and not a current roster.

Hertz and Avis are named for this airport in older third-party listings and are not on the operator's current list. Check that the firm you have booked with is still there before you rely on collecting a car at the airport.

Facilities at Samui Airport

The airport's own listing names fourteen places to eat and drink, all in an area it calls Samui Park Avenue, with hours of 06:00 to 18:00 daily. Those hours stop well before the end of the evening, and a late departure may find the food shut. The airline puts Samui Park Avenue in an open space among the coconut trees, and guides elsewhere place it in the public part of the airport, before security.

Third-party guides also list free Wi-Fi for passengers, cash machines and a currency exchange counter in the arrivals hall, SIM card booths, short and long-term parking, and a medical room staffed by a nurse on the north side of arrivals. The same guides record no left-luggage or storage facility here, which is worth knowing if you had planned to leave bags for the day.

The airport's website publishes opening hours for its eating places, and for one of the car hire firms, but not for the airport itself, and its pages carry no date showing when any of these lists was last checked. Confirm anything you intend to rely on, on the day you travel.