Phuket trip planner: a day-by-day plan you can save and send

How the plan is built

1. Where you sleep: the area you chose, or the one the planner suggests from your interests and the areas the index can price.
2. What you do: one or two entries per day from 59 places and 25 beaches, scored by interest match, distance from your base and the month you are travelling. A full-day trip owns the day.
3. What it costs: hotel median × nights × rooms, daily budget × nights × people, the priced activities in the plan × people, the airport taxi × 2, and a scooter or car day rate × nights.
4. What it will not do: invent a price, put the Similan Islands in a closed month, or send you across the island twice in one day.

Narrower question — what does a week in one area cost, with no itinerary? The trip cost calculator answers that in four fields.

What the planner actually does

Most trip planners are a form that emails you a brochure. This one is arithmetic you can check. You give it four things — when you arrive, how long you stay, who is coming and what you want out of the island — and it does three jobs in order. First it settles where you sleep, either the area you picked or, if you asked it to choose, the area whose surroundings best fit your interests and which the index can actually price. Then it fills the days: one or two things per day drawn from 59 places and 25 beaches, chosen by how well they match your interests, how far they are from your base on the site's stated road model, and whether they are any good in the month you are coming. Finally it prices the whole thing from the Phuket Travel Price Index: the hotel median for your class and area, the daily-budget median for your class, the airport taxi for your area, a scooter or a car, and every activity in the plan that has a dated figure.

The plan that comes out is not a booking and not a quote. It is the middle of the market on a fixed observation date, printed with that date next to every line, so you can tell how old each number is. Where the index has not measured something — a dive trip quoted per person per season, a yacht charter quoted per boat, a seafood market priced by the kilo — the line shows an em dash and stays out of the total. That is the whole discipline of this site: a wrong number is worse than no number.

Why the season changes the plan and not just the price

Phuket has one weather fact that matters more than the rain: the sea. The island's marine normals put the rough-sea days in May–September and a calm Andaman in October–April, and that single line reorders a holiday. The planner knows it. A beach that faces the south-west monsoon carries a caveat in the months when red flags are normal; a sheltered beach on the east coast does not, because the swell never reaches it. Boat trips get the same treatment from the other side — Phang Nga Bay runs all year because it is sheltered, so it stays in a August plan, while the exposed crossings are marked as the days a harbour-master can cancel.

Two closures are hard rules rather than caveats. The Similan Islands national park is open 15 October to 15 May only, so in the closed months the planner will not put it in a day at all — no amount of interest ticking will conjure a trip that legally cannot sail. Maya Bay closes 1 August to 30 September every year, but the Phi Phi trip still runs and swaps the stop, so that one is a note on the line rather than a deletion. If you plan without dates, the planner says so and prices the high season, instead of quietly picking a month for you.

Distance is the hidden cost of a Phuket holiday

The island is fifty kilometres long and its roads cross hills. A visitor who books a hotel in Mai Khao because it looked quiet, and then plans a day in the Old Town, an evening in Patong and a boat from Chalong, will spend more of the week in a taxi than on a beach. The planner works from the coordinates in the catalogue and the same road model the rest of the site uses — 1.4 times the straight line at 30 km/h, rounded to five minutes, with the airport leg driven at 45 km/h on the bypass — and prints the travel time next to every line. It also refuses to build a day out of two things at opposite ends of the island, and it keeps the arrival and departure days close to the hotel, because nobody wants a two-hour drive after a night flight.

That is also why the "suggest an area" option exists. Somebody who ticks islands, food and culture belongs near a pier and the town; somebody who ticks beaches and quiet belongs on the north-west coast; somebody travelling with children is better off near the airport than at the far southern tip. The suggestion is deterministic — the same inputs give the same answer — and it is only a suggestion: if you have already booked, put your area in the form and the plan rebuilds around it.

The link is the plan

There is no account, no email gate and no server-side plan store. Everything you choose is packed into a short code in the address bar, so the link in your browser is a complete description of your trip. Copy it into a message and the person who opens it sees exactly the plan you built, on their phone, in their own currency setting if they change it. Print the page and you get the itinerary and the estimate on a sheet or two of paper, with the form and the sign-up block stripped out — the same route as "save as PDF" in every browser. The planner also keeps the last plan you built in your own browser's storage and offers to continue it when you come back, which is a convenience, not a copy: clear your browser and the link still works.

The estimate is shown in dollars because the index observes in dollars, with the total repeated in your currency at a dated rate. Every conversion prints the rate and the date it was taken, and where the European Central Bank does not publish a currency, the number goes through the baht with both legs of the cross rate dated. That is more arithmetic than most people want to see, and it is deliberately visible anyway: a figure whose provenance you cannot check is a marketing figure.

When to send the plan to a person

A plan is a good brief. When the total goes past $10,000 for the week, the planner says so, because at that point the trip stops being an accommodation booking and starts being a logistics problem: a staffed villa instead of two hotel rooms, a private boat instead of a join-in seat, a driver instead of taxi apps. That is what the concierge side of this site does, and the plan you built is the fastest possible handover — dates, party, base, interests, the day-by-day order and the arithmetic behind the total, in one message.

For an ordinary week the same button is still useful for a different reason. The planner is honest about what it cannot know: whether the villa you saw is actually available in February, whether a boat operator is any good, whether the road up to the Big Buddha is passable after a week of rain. Those are questions for somebody on the island. Send the link, add a line about what you are unsure of, and you get an answer with the plan already in front of the person reading it — instead of the usual first exchange, which is four emails establishing when you are coming and how many of you there are. The trip-cost calculator on this site answers the narrower question of what a week costs in one area; the planner answers what the week looks like.