Getting Around Koh Tao: The Island Finally Has a Taxi App

Getting around Koh Tao has always been the awkward part

You land at Mae Haad pier with a backpack, a dive bag and no idea what a ride to your resort should cost. There is no Grab here. There is no Bolt. What there is: songthaew pickups parked at the pier, a taxi boat if you are heading somewhere with no road, and a price that depends entirely on how the negotiation goes.

It is the single most common question we get from students before they arrive - not "what is the diving like", but "how do I get from the pier to you, and how much should I pay?". For years the honest answer was "ask, then agree the price before you get in".

That changed. Koh Tao now has a real ride app, with the island mapped into zones and a fixed price you can read before you book anything.

We Love Koh Tao: the island's first taxi app

We Love Koh Tao is a ride app built specifically for this island - 21 km² of steep hills, dirt tracks and bays you can only reach by boat. Three ride types are live today: taxi (a car or pickup, priced per vehicle), taxi boat (for the bays with no road access) and taxi bike (a scooter ride, single passenger).

It was built by Tafuros, the same team behind this website, our course registration and booking systems, and T-ink, our custom t-shirt printing app. On the island the service is operated by Lotus Group.

You do not need to install anything to try it - it runs in any mobile browser. iPhone users can also get it from the App Store. Two more sections, tours & dives and restaurants, are marked coming soon inside the app.

Fixed fares: you read the price before you book

This is the part that matters. There are no meters and no surge pricing. The whole island is mapped into zones, and every zone pair has a set price. You see that number, in baht, before you tap the request button.

A taxi fare is per vehicle, not per person - up to 3 passengers are included, and it is 100 THB for each extra passenger after that. There is a 300 THB minimum on any taxi ride, which is worth knowing before you book a two-minute hop.

Here are real fares from the app's own board, for a taxi with up to three people:

Bikes, day hire and the bays with no road

A taxi bike is the cheap option if you are travelling alone and light: 200 THB minimum, then 20 THB per minute beyond that. Not the one to pick with a full dive bag.

If you want to loop the whole island - viewpoints, lunch, a swim, back again - there is a full-day charter at 3,500 THB for up to 4 people, plus 500 THB per extra person. You can also add waiting time to a normal booking, charged at 500 THB per 30-minute block, which is genuinely useful if you are stopping at a viewpoint on the way somewhere.

Several of the best spots on Koh Tao have no road at all - Mango Bay and Koh Nang Yuan among them. Those are taxi boat routes: you take a taxi to the departure point and continue by longtail. Boat routes are quoted inside the app rather than off a fixed road-zone board, so check the price on screen before you confirm.

How to book a ride, step by step

1. Open the app. On iPhone, install it from the App Store. On Android or anything else, open welovekohtao.com/app in your browser - it works as a web app, and you can add it to your home screen so it behaves like an installed one. There is no Android app on Google Play.

2. Create an account. Sign up with your email address; a verification code arrives by mail and you are in. It takes about a minute.

3. Pick where you are going. The destination list is grouped into hubs, beaches, dive clubs and restaurants, so you can usually just tap the name. You can also search any address or drop a pin on the map.

4. Check the fare, then request. The fixed price shows with distance and a rough duration. Adjust passengers if there are more than three of you, and optionally schedule a return trip, add waiting time, or switch to day hire. Then request the ride - the app matches you to the nearest available driver and you can follow them on the map.

5. Pay the driver in cash on arrival. Card payment is not live yet, so bring baht.

One honest note: this is a young service with a small driver pool, so at quiet hours there may be nobody online. If that happens the app hands you a WhatsApp fallback rather than leaving you stranded - but do not treat it as a guaranteed 24/7 fleet just yet.

Getting to Siam Scuba, and out to the dive sites

Siam Scuba is listed in the app under dive clubs, so you can select us as your destination by name instead of trying to describe where in Sairee we are. Pick us from the list, see the fare, and turn up.

Book a course with us and your transfer from the pier is free. That covers every course we run - Discover Scuba, Open Water, Advanced Open Water, the specialty courses, Divemaster and the instructor course. Coming for fun dives instead, your pier transfer is 150 THB rather than the standard 400.

Either way, tell us which ferry you are on when you book and we will have the ride waiting - so your first Koh Tao taxi conversation is not a negotiation with a backpack on.

Early starts, and reading the island off the map

Our boat mornings start early - club arrival time is 06:00. Booking the night before, or scheduling your return trip at the same time as the outbound one, saves a lot of standing around in the dark hoping something drives past.

The app also carries the island's hand-painted dive map - the one that hangs on dive-shop walls here. Every dive site, beach and viewpoint on it is tappable, so you can read what a site is like and book a fixed-fare ride to the bay it leaves from:

Where the map actually takes you

If you are new to Koh Tao, the map is the fastest way to understand why the island punches so far above its size. The pinnacles off the north-west - Chumphon, Green Rock, White Rock - are the deep, big-fish sites. The HTMS Sattakut wreck sits in easy recreational depth. Koh Nang Yuan is the three-islands-and-a-sandbar postcard everyone arrives having already seen.

Most of those you reach by dive boat with us rather than by taxi. The taxi part matters for everything else - getting to the pier for a 06:00 start, getting to Tanote or Hin Wong on a day off, getting home from Sairee at 01:00 without haggling.

Not booked your diving yet? Our PADI courses run from first breath underwater through to instructor, and if you are already certified you can book a fun dive with us directly.

What is not in the app yet

Being straight with you, because a half-finished picture is worse than no picture:

Cash only. Card payment is built but not switched on. Bring baht for the driver.

No Android app. iPhone has a native app; everyone else uses the browser version, which you can add to your home screen. Nothing is on Google Play.

Tours, dives and restaurants are coming soon. Those tiles exist in the app but are not live, so you cannot book a dive trip or a table through it today.

Small driver pool. This is an early, soft launch at island scale, not a city ride-hailing network. Availability at 03:00 is not guaranteed.

For what it is worth, that list is shrinking fast - and the core thing, knowing the price before you get in a vehicle on Koh Tao, works today.