While we travel, we love to go on day trips and do local experiences. One of our favourite websites to book these activities is Get Your Guide. We rely heavily on Get Your Guide reviews for each activity that we book, so we know that we’re making the best choice for what we want to do. Ideally, we choose activities that have a lot of reviews and a high star rating, including when we booked the Pattaya Koh Larn & Sanctuary of Truth Day Trip from Bangkok.

We chose to do this tour because we wanted to get out of the city and see some more of Thailand. We also didn’t have a huge amount of time so wanted to see as much as we could in one day. As for the tour, we wanted to go to a beach and see something cool which ended up being the Sanctuary of Truth. This post will be our honest and detailed review of our experience doing this activity.

In this post:

1. Overview
2. Cost and Inclusions
3. Highlights
4. Lowlights
5. Would We Recommend It?

This tour is operated by the company TripGuru, and they offer hotel pickups or meeting points. Once you get onto the coach with the rest of the group, you’ll drive two and a half hours to the beachside town of Pattaya. Here, you’ll stop at the Pattaya sign to take some photos of the view of the water and city below. The bus will then take you down to the water where you’ll get on a speedboat for a quick 30 minute ride over to Ko Lan (Coral Island).

On Ko Lan you’ll have four hours to swim, relax on the beach, and have some food. From there, you’ll take the 30 minute speedboat back to Pattaya, where you’ll get back on the bus and head to the Sanctuary of Truth. Here, you have two hours to either tour the Sanctuary, or enjoy the view. We chose not to visit the Sanctuary, but instead relaxed at the nearby cafe and visited the free animal pens.

After that, you’ll jump back on the coach and drive two and a half hours back to Bangkok. The whole tour should be 10 hours, however with’s notoriously bad traffic, it can be longer. Our tour was close to 12 hours.

There are 5 different options to choose from for the Pattaya Koh Larn & Sanctuary of Truth Day Trip from Bangkok:

• Small Group Tour without Entrance Fees with Meeting Point – ~1736 Thai Bhat. This option starts at 7am and you’ll meet at a meeting point in the city. It doesn’t include entrance fees to the Sanctuary of Truth, but you can pay in cash on the tour.
• Small Group Tour without Entrance Fees with Hotel Pickup – ~1802 Thai Bhat. This option starts at 7am. You’ll get picked up from your hotel and you can check when booking to make sure your hotel is in the eligible pick up area. It doesn’t include entrance fees to the Sanctuary of Truth, but you can pay in cash on the tour.
• Small Group Tour with Entrance Fees With Meeting Point – ~2391 Thai Bhat. This option starts at 7am and you’ll meet at a meeting point in the city. It also includes entrance fees to the Sanctuary of Truth.
• Small Group Tour with Entrance Fees with Hotel Pickup – ~2391 Thai Bhat. This option starts at 7am. You’ll get picked up from your hotel and you can check when booking to make sure your hotel is in the eligible pick up area. It also includes entrance fees to the Sanctuary of Truth.
• Private Tour in English – ~8517 Thai Bhat. This option starts at either 6 or 7am. It is the same itinerary as above, but is a private tour instead of in a small group.

Please note that the prices may change seasonally or with exchange rates, depending on where you are booking from.

We loved getting to see a different part of Thailand from Bangkok without the stress of organising it ourselves. The guide was really nice and the bus was comfortable for the long journeys. We enjoyed getting to lounge on the beach in chairs that had shades over them, so we weren’t as worried about sunburn.

Our favourite part though was getting to see the Sanctuary of Truth. Even though we didn’t go inside, the outside and the view you get of it is simply stunning. The place you stop has a little café with outdoor seating and you can order some delicious food and drinks while enjoying the view. When we visited there was also a little area with farm animals we could walk around and look at. We also thought the day was nicely spaced out and we had enough time to really relax and enjoy the scenery around us.

While this tour has some great parts to it, the thing we remember the most about it is how dirty the beach on Ko Lan was. The water had so much rubbish in it, you couldn’t swim anywhere without stepping on or swimming into something. It was so disappointing as we really wanted to enjoy a beautiful Thai beach, and we didn’t get that. The beach bathrooms were also really dirty, and there were so many people trying to sell you things constantly walking up and down the beach.

At the Sanctuary of Truth, there were elephants that people could pay to ride on around the museum. We didn’t look into the ethics of this particular location, as we had no intention of riding the elephants. In general, riding elephants is not recommended. If you do want this experience, we would recommend you look into this specific location to see how they treat the animals first. Also worth noting that if you get motion sick, the speedboat ride may be tough for you because it’s very fast and bumpy.

As we briefly mentioned above, the traffic in Bangkok meant this tour was longer than expected. While this is obviously not the fault of the tour organisers, just be prepared that you may be arriving back later than scheduled. We would recommend packing some snacks just in case, as we were so hungry by the time we arrived back in the city.

While we loved getting to see a different part of Thailand, honestly the quality of the beach on Ko Lan really marred this tour for us. We know the rubbish on the beach is likely due to over tourism and it really made us feel quite down to see how bad it was. We did still enjoy our time at the beach, but we couldn’t really swim. Aside from that, we really loved getting to see the Sanctuary of Truth, even if we didn’t go inside. We bought some fruit smoothies, sat on the balcony and enjoyed the beautiful wooden museum.

Overall, if you don’t plan on swimming or are happy to lounge on the beach, this tour would be great for you. You get to see some beautiful scenery and get to experience a wonderful landmark which is really cool. However, if you’re looking for a relaxing beach day trip where you can really enjoy the sand and the water, this might not be the best tour for you. It really depends what you want out of the tour, how long you have and what you want to see.

If you think it’s the right tour for you, why not go ahead and book?

To see our experience on the Pattaya Koh Larn & Sanctuary of Truth Day Trip from Bangkok, check out our vlog from our time in Bangkok:

• How to Make the Most of Your Time in Bangkok
• The Best Bus Company to Travel South East Asia