12Go Data Shows 49% Rise in Thailand Multimodal Travel Bookings, Revealing the Top 5 Routes
Thailand's islands are increasingly being reached through multimodal journeys, as travellers combine buses, minivans, ferries and — less often — trains and flights to create multi-stop trips, according to travel booking platform 12Go.
Bookings for Thailand-origin trips using two or more types of transport grew 49% in 2025 compared with 2024, according to 12Go. This was faster than the 40% growth in Thailand-origin bookings overall. Of these multimodal trips, 88% included an island destination.
Rather than booking a single flight to a resort destination, more travellers are building trips around several destinations — travelling from Bangkok to the south, continuing by road to the coast and then taking a ferry to an island. The trend is particularly relevant in Thailand, where major tourism hubs are connected to a vast network of road, rail, air and sea transport.
Top 5 multimodal routes in Thailand by booking volume, with year-on-year growth:
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Bangkok to Koh Chang — +77%
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Ao Nang to Koh Samui — +513%
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Bangkok to Koh Samet — +56%
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Krabi to Koh Samui — +60%
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Koh Tao to Ao Nang — +87%
For travellers, however, planning these journeys has traditionally meant searching across different operators and websites while working out connections between each leg of the trip.
Digital travel platforms are helping make this easier by bringing different transport options together in one place. 12Go sold more than 8.7 million tickets in 2025, and offers access to more than 730,000 routes and over 20,000 transport operators across more than 140 markets.
As more of these connections become available through a single platform, multimodal travel is becoming easier to plan and book. The trend also reflects a wider shift in how travellers explore destinations, with travellers increasingly combining destinations and transport modes within the same trip.
Bangkok–Koh Chang was Thailand's largest multimodal route on the platform in 2025, with bookings up 77% year on year, while Bangkok–Koh Samet bookings increased 56%.
The fastest-growing of the five largest multimodal corridors were connections between Thailand's Andaman coast and Gulf islands, with Ao Nang–Koh Samui bookings jumping 513%, Koh Tao–Ao Nang rising 87% and Krabi–Koh Samui growing 60%.
The growing interest in islands beyond Thailand's most established resorts highlights the role that transport accessibility can play in destination choice. Koh Chang, for example, offers an island experience without requiring a domestic flight from Bangkok. On 12Go, the Bangkok–Koh Chang corridor is served predominantly by road-and-ferry combinations: a minivan or coach to the Trat coast, followed by a ferry.
The rise in multimodal travel also highlights a potential role for artificial intelligence in simplifying complex journeys. 12Go's ChatGPT app lets travellers describe their trip in natural language and explore different transport options in one conversation, without needing to know the exact route, operator or transport mode. This moves travel planning from searching for individual routes to planning the journey as a whole.
For Thailand, where reaching an island often involves several connections, that change could help make more destinations accessible to independent international travellers. As tourism continues to expand beyond the country's traditional hotspots, the next opportunity may be to connect the dots between them — making Bangkok a starting point, the mainland a gateway and Thailand's islands part of a more connected journey.
