Questions about the canal boat

How much does it cost?

Between 16 and 26 baht, by distance. Only six prices exist: 16, 18, 20, 22, 24 and 26, and the Marine Department publishes one of them for every pair of piers.

Counting piers does not work. They sit anywhere from about 100 m to 1.5 km apart, so the same number of stops can cost different amounts. From Pratunam, three piers west is 16 baht and three east is 18. The front-page calculator gives the published price for any two.

Marine Department fare tool · checked 30 September 2026

Where do I buy a ticket?

On the boat. There is no ticket booth: a conductor collects as you sit, so tell them your pier. Cash is easiest, and PromptPay is accepted. Guides that tell you to buy before boarding are wrong.

The QR code near the seats is the Marine Department's fare checker, not a way to pay. It tells you what the fare to your pier should be.

Do I have to change boats?

Only if you cross Pratunam, pier 5, where the Golden Mount line (piers 1 to 5) meets the NIDA line (piers 5 to 28). That means two boats and a short walk along the pier.

Does the change cost me twice?

No. The fare runs from where you board to where you get off, change included. Tell the conductor your final pier, not where you change.

What time is the first and last boat?

Four schedules, by direction and by day, and Saturday and Sunday are not the same. The earliest departure anywhere is 05:30, westbound from Wat Sriboonreung on a weekday; the latest is 20:30, eastbound from Pratunam, also a weekday. The full table is on the front page.

The catch: the last westbound boat leaves Wat Sriboonreung more than an hour before the last eastbound leaves Pratunam. An evening out at one end of the canal does not come home the way it went.

Marine Department printed timetable, sections 3.3 · checked 19 September 2026

How long will it take?

Nobody publishes run times for this service. The front-page figure is an estimate from the number of stops, shown as a five-minute band and labelled as one.

What moves it is loading time at each pier, not traffic, which is why the rush hour is slower on an empty canal.

Where does the route start and end?

Panfa Leelard in the west, by the Golden Mount and walkable from Khao San Road, to Wat Sriboonreung in the east, past Bangkapi. Twenty-eight piers.

17 km along the canal itself. In a straight line the two ends are 15.8 km apart, which is how much of the city the boat cuts across.

Pier coordinates from Bangkok Metropolitan Administration open data · checked 12 September 2026

What are the Golden Mount and NIDA lines?

The operator's names for the two halves of one canal. Golden Mount is piers 1 to 5, Panfa Leelard to Pratunam. NIDA is piers 5 to 28, Pratunam out to Wat Sriboonreung. Same fare table, two boats.

Which piers connect to the BTS, MRT or Airport Rail Link?

• Sapan Hua Chang — BTS Ratchathewi
• Pratunam — ARL Ratchaprarop
• Chitlom — BTS Chit Lom
• Asoke-Petchaburi — MRT Phetchaburi and ARL Makkasan
• Ram 1 — ARL Ramkhamhaeng
• The Mall Bangkapi — MRT Bang Kapi
• Bangkapi — MRT Yaek Lam Sali

These are the nearest stations, and you walk between them.

Checked 12 September 2026

Is this the boat to the Grand Palace and Wat Arun?

No. Those are on the Chao Phraya river, a different waterway with a different operator. The canal boat crosses the city east to west and stops at Panfa Leelard without reaching the river.

Panfa Leelard is the closest it gets to the old town, and the temples are a walk or a short ride from there.

Is it Saen Saeb or Saen Saep?

Both, and the same canal. The Thai word ends in บ, said as an unreleased p at the end of a syllable, so transcribing the sound gives Saep and transcribing the letter gives Saeb.

Sansab and San Sab are the same word again. Thai government material in English uses more than one, sometimes on the same page, so search for whichever you like.

Are you the boat operator?

No. Not the operator, not the Marine Department, not anybody's agent, and no relationship with any of them. Nothing here is official.

The boats are run by บริษัท ครอบครัวขนส่ง (2002) จำกัด, Family Transport (2002) Co., Ltd., who have no idea we exist. We are an independent aggregator: we read the public sources, compare them and publish what they say.

Where do your numbers come from?

Thai government documents first, English writing last. Thailand does not reliably update its English, and what is out of date gets copied.

Every number carries the date we last checked it against its source, not the date the page was built, and rebuilding does not move those dates.

Where two official documents disagree, and they do, we say so. What we cannot source is left out, which is why there is no figure above for how often the boats come.

Why is your fare different from other sites?

The fare moves. It is tied to the diesel price and re-set a few times a year, so any figure is a snapshot. See the note at the foot of this page.

Most English pages about this canal work from a 2018 copy of the operator's old website, offline since 2019 and now a spam domain. Figures like 8–22, 10–20 and 15–25 still circulate from it.

Can I reuse this?

Yes. Search indexing, AI input and AI training are all granted in robots.txt, and llms.txt gives machine readers the full pier list, the fare matrix and the timetable in plain text.

A link back is appreciated and not required. Check the date next to a number before you republish it.