Labuan Bajo Port Costs, Explained

Park entrance (all-in): $40–50 for foreign visitors, $20–25 for Indonesian citizens.

This already bundles the local guide fee shared across a group of 1–5 people, plus conservation/dermaga charges bundled by operators.

The boat or speedboat charter is a separate, larger line item quoted directly by the operator — not a port fee.

Every number below carries a source and a date because port pricing in Labuan Bajo has a history of confusion — a discontinued $54 "premium tariff" proposal from 2022 still circulates online as if it were current policy. This page separates what is regulated, what is operator-set, and what is simply myth.

The current legal basis is Government Regulation (PP) No. 36 of 2024 on tariffs for non-tax state revenue at the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, which governs Komodo National Park entrance fees along with every other conservation area in Indonesia. Under this regulation, the park-side entrance cost is $40–50 per foreign visitor, regardless of which island inside the park you visit (Padar, Rinca, or Komodo Island itself). Indonesian citizens pay a domestic rate of $20–25. These figures are published on the Komodo National Park authority's own tariff page.

This fee is collected per person, per day inside the park boundary — it is separate from the boat that gets you there, separate from any guide, and separate from anything charged at Labuan Bajo's harbor itself, which the National Park does not administer.

These are the only figures fixed by regulation; everything else on this table is operator practice, not law.

Because in 2022 the Komodo National Park authority proposed a $288 annual-membership-style "conservation" scheme (sometimes summarized in the press as roughly $54 for a short visit) aimed at capping visitor numbers to Komodo Island specifically. The plan drew heavy pushback from Labuan Bajo's tourism industry and was never implemented — it was suspended before taking effect. Some blogs and forum posts written during that 2022 controversy were never updated, so the $54 figure keeps resurfacing as if it were today's price. It is not. The tariff actually in force today is the $40–50 all-in park-side rate under PP 36/2024 described above.

There is no single “harbor ticket price” the way there is for a bus terminal. What you pay depends entirely on the type of boat and how the trip is packaged:

• Shared open-trip boats departing from the harbor area pool multiple travelers onto one wooden boat and are the cheapest way out to Padar, Rinca, and Pink Beach — priced per person by the operator, not the port.
• Private speedboats charter the whole vessel for your group, cutting travel time roughly in half compared to a wooden boat, at a correspondingly higher per-trip rate.
• Multi-day liveaboards and phinisi charters price by the boat and by the number of nights, not by a “ticket” at all.

Because these rates change with fuel prices, season, and vessel class, this page does not print a single number that would go stale — check current speedboat charter rates directly from Komodo Luxury, where pricing is quoted per boat and updated against real departures rather than guessed at from a blog.

Combining the regulated PNBP fee with the operator-side costs that every one-day trip bundles, a realistic total for one foreign adult on a shared one-day trip looks like this:

This is the government-and-guide portion only. The boat itself is the larger cost and is never a fixed ‘port fee’ — it is quoted per vessel by the charter operator.

If you are trying to plan a full multi-day itinerary rather than a single day trip, the per-night phinisi and liveaboard rates follow a different structure entirely — see current Komodo liveaboard options for boat-inclusive multi-day pricing.

Small, informally-run parking areas near the Labuan Bajo waterfront do charge a nominal fee, as is standard at most Indonesian public facilities — but there is no single published official tariff for harbor-area parking the way there is for the park entrance. If you are being dropped off by taxi or hotel shuttle rather than self-driving, this cost does not apply at all. We are not publishing an invented parking figure here; ask your driver or hotel directly, since rates are set locally and vary by operator, not by regulation.

This is a genuine source of confusion when comparing prices between operators, because the two pricing models produce very different-looking numbers for the same trip. Shared open-trip and shared liveaboard cabins are quoted per person — you’re paying for one seat or one cabin bunk on a boat that’s also carrying other travelers. Private charters, by contrast, are quoted per boat, per day or per night — the number you see is the cost of the entire vessel, which you then split across your own group however you like. A private day-charter speedboat quoted at a given daily rate can work out cheaper per person than a shared boat once you have four or five people to split it across, while for a solo traveler the shared per-person rate is almost always the lower absolute cost. Always confirm which model a quoted number reflects before comparing two operators’ prices side by side — a “per boat” figure and a “per person” figure are not directly comparable without doing that division first.

A few recurring ones show up across traveler reports and operator fine print, worth checking for specifically before you book:

• Guide tipping — not mandatory, not fixed by any regulation, but a customary courtesy in Indonesia’s tourism industry for a guide who has done a good job across a full day.
• Equipment rental — snorkel gear is bundled by some operators and charged as an add-on by others; ask specifically rather than assuming it’s included.
• Meals on multi-day charters — usually included in the base package, but confirm whether drinks (especially alcoholic ones) are included or billed separately at the end of the trip.
• Transport to and from the harbor itself — a taxi or hotel shuttle to reach the departure point is a separate cost from the boat trip, and easy to forget when budgeting only for the trip itself.

None of these are port fees, and none of them are fixed by government regulation — they are standard travel-industry costs that simply aren’t always spelled out clearly in a headline package price. Asking your operator for a complete, itemized quote before paying a deposit is the most reliable way to avoid a surprise on the day.

These are general patterns, not fixed rules — request an itemized quote for your specific group size and dates rather than assuming based on group size alone.

No the PNBP entrance fee itself is flat regardless of which island or site inside Komodo National Park you visit in a day. What changes between destinations is the boat time to get there and therefore the operator’s package price, not the government fee. See our companion page on visiting Padar, Rinca, and Pink Beach from Bajo Port for how travel time affects itinerary and pricing structure.

SiOra is the digital park-entry booking and quota system the Komodo National Park authority has rolled out to manage visitor numbers, mandatory since April 2026. It does not add a new tariff on top of the PNBP rate above — it is the booking mechanism through which the existing PNBP fee is paid and your visit slot is confirmed against the park’s daily quota. In practice, most travelers never touch SiOra directly: your boat operator or guide handles the booking and folds the PNBP charge into your package invoice.

No — this is a common misreading. The approximately 1,000-visitor daily figure applies to the entire Komodo National Park, split across three entry sessions per day, not to Padar Island alone. Padar’s own capacity is a smaller subset of that park-wide number. If you are planning around quota availability, book through an operator who confirms your SiOra slot in advance rather than assuming a specific island has its own separate allowance.