Why a Phuket boat charter is so hard to price
Ask three Phuket charter companies what a day on the water costs and you will get three numbers in three formats, and possibly three currencies. This is not a scam. It is a pricing culture that grew up around a market where most customers book once, from abroad, and never compare notes afterwards.
The currency problem comes first. In a survey of 25 charter operators on the island, only 7 published baht prices across their whole fleet. Six published no baht price at all: their sites quoted exclusively in dollars, euros or pounds. Two published no prices anywhere and asked visitors to enquire. The remaining ten mixed it, with baht on the day trips, dollars on the superyachts, and sometimes a currency switcher in the header that quietly changed the number you had been looking at.
For a traveller this has a practical consequence. A quote in dollars is a quote plus an exchange rate plus, quite often, a card conversion fee. Two boats that look 400 dollars apart online can end up within a few thousand baht of each other once everything settles, and the cheaper-looking one is not always the cheaper one.
The second problem is what the number covers. Twenty of the 25 companies published a written list of inclusions; five did not. The items that move a total most are fuel surcharges, national park entrance fees, crew gratuity expectations, lunch, and hotel transfers. Park fees in particular are charged per person and are not trivial. On a full boat they change the arithmetic. A charter quoted from a low figure often assumes a half-day, a minimum group, low season, or all three.
The third is the booking mechanism, which tells you more about pricing than it looks like it should. Six of the 25 offered instant online booking with a confirmed price. Eighteen used an enquiry form, and one published contact details only. An enquiry form is not a red flag, because crewed charters genuinely vary by date, group size and route, but it does mean the published price is an opening position rather than a price.
What should you actually do? Convert everything to baht before you compare. Ask for the total for your group on your date, not the from price. Ask specifically whether park fees, fuel and lunch are inside or outside that total. And ask what happens to your money if the captain cancels for weather, which between May and October is a live possibility rather than a hypothetical one.
For anyone who wants the comparison already done, there is a breakdown of current Phuket charter prices that works through the published rates company by company and shows which figures are per-boat, which are per-person, and which are opening positions.
The boats themselves are mostly excellent. The pricing is just less transparent than the water.