Komodo National Park guide: dragons, reefs and fees

A park that is mostly sea

The boat pulls out of Labuan Bajo harbour while the town is still cool, and by mid-morning the air over the deck is heading for 40°C. That is the dry season here, May to October, in one of the driest corners of Indonesia: 800 to 1,000 mm of rain across a whole year, hills the colour of straw, water the colour of a swimming pool. ¹¹

Komodo National Park covers 173,300 hectares, and 66 percent of that is water: 114,801 hectares of sea against 58,499 of land, scattered across at least 142 islands. ¹² Five of those islands hold Komodo dragons. ¹² UNESCO's listing puts the wild population at about 5,700 animals, across Komodo, Rinca, Gili Motang and parts of western and northern Flores. ¹³

The dragons bring people here, and they are a smaller share of the park than the photographs suggest. Seven land mammals live in it, including an endemic rat and the crab-eating macaque, along with 72 bird species, among them the lesser sulphur-crested cockatoo and the orange-footed scrubfowl. ¹³

Komodo sits at the western end of Flores, in East Nusa Tenggara; the Indonesia travel guide sets it beside the rest of the country. ¹²

Which islands can you actually land on?

Three ranger stations take visitors ashore. The rest of the park is reef, sandbar, village or closed.

The park zones itself, and the zones decide your day. Core and wilderness zones take no visitor landings at all. Tourism-use zones hold the trekking stations and the dive sites. Traditional-use and settlement zones cover local fishing grounds and the villages, with pelagic and research zones on top of those. ²

Three ranger stations take people ashore: Loh Buaya on Rinca, Loh Liang on Komodo and Padar Selatan on Padar. The park also names Kalong for evening wildlife watching, Gili Lawa for trekking and snorkeling, and Taka Makassar for snorkeling and diving. ⁷

Trekking for dragons happens at two of those three sites. Loh Buaya and Loh Liang held about 109 animals between them at the 2022 count, out of roughly 5,700 in the wild. ^{1, 13} Padar is climbed for the ridge, at first light, before the heat arrives.

How do you get to Komodo National Park?

Every route in goes through Labuan Bajo, at the west end of Flores. The flight from Bali runs about 1 hour 10 minutes, and the harbour sits about 10 minutes from the airport terminal. ² MMT's Bali to Labuan Bajo page covers the flights, the bag limits and the ferry alternative.

From the harbour the decision is hull speed. A modern speedboat reaches Rinca in 45 to 60 minutes and Komodo Island in about 2 hours. A traditional phinisi takes roughly 2 hours and 4 to 4.5 hours for the same two runs. ²

That gap is the whole liveaboard case. A phinisi crosses at night and wakes you at the site; a day boat spends the morning getting out and the afternoon coming back. MMT weighs the two on price in liveaboard or day trips from Labuan Bajo.

Booking, and the 1,000-a-day cap

The reservation now comes before the boat, and the quota is the reason.

Since 1 April 2026 the park admits 1,000 people a day, booked ahead through its own SiOra platform. Reservations, permits and quota information all run there, for Indonesian and foreign visitors alike, which ends the walk-up ticket. ^{1, 6}

The cap bites because the park was busier than it. Komodo recorded 429,509 visitors in 2025, about 68 percent of them foreign, an average of 1,177 a day. A year at 1,000 a day comes to 365,000 people, some 64,509 fewer than walked in last year. ⁶

1. 01

   Fix the dates, then the permit

   Reserve through SiOra before you pay for anything else. The platform issues the permit and shows the quota, and since 1 April 2026 every visitor books in advance. ^{1, 6}

2. 02

   Choose the sites, then the boat

   Loh Buaya, Loh Liang and Padar Selatan are the three trekking stations, and each sits a different run from the harbour. Pick the sites first and let the boat follow. ^{7, 2}

3. 03

   Put the ranger in the budget

   Guiding runs through the park's own cooperative, which keeps 50 naturalist guides. Allow IDR 200,000 for a group of up to five on Komodo or Rinca, IDR 150,000 on Padar. ^{9, 4}

4. 04

   Ask the operator to itemise the park charges

   Entrance, diving, conservation, harbour and the vessel's own entry ticket are separate lines. Ask in writing which of them your fare already covers. ^{3, 14, 4}

5. 05

   Carry the rupiah figure you expect

   At Bank Indonesia's JISDOR rate of Rp 17,917 to the dollar on 25 September 2026, the day's park minimum of IDR 375,000 is about USD 20.93. ^{5, 4}

What does it cost to enter Komodo National Park?

The tariff that took effect on 30 October 2024, plus two charges a resort inside the park says it collects.

A foreign visitor pays IDR 250,000 a day, about USD 13.95, and the price holds on a Sunday. The weekday and weekend split applies to the domestic ticket: Indonesian citizens pay IDR 50,000 midweek and IDR 75,000 on Sundays and holidays. ^{3, 5}

The entrance ticket already covers trekking, wildlife watching and snorkeling. ³ Outside it sit the ranger, the dive ticket and, per a dive resort's own 2026 guide, two more charges: IDR 100,000 for conservation and IDR 25,000 for the harbour when you arrive by boat. Add those and a day inside the park opens at IDR 375,000, about USD 20.93. ^{4, 5}

Ask your operator to itemise both on the invoice. They are the resort's published figures, not the government's. MMT sets Komodo beside other protected reefs in marine park and conservation fees, and prices a whole week, flights included, in how much a Komodo trip costs. ⁴

Why every trek walks with a ranger

The park's own visitor protocol makes the naturalist guide on the trail an instruction. Ignoring the directions, information or prohibitions of park staff or of the guide on duty along a trekking route is a listed violation. ⁸

Guiding runs through a single cooperative, KSU Taman Nasional Komodo, which has held the park's nature-tourism guiding licence since 2006 and keeps 50 trained naturalist guides. ⁹ A dive resort's 2026 guide prices the walk at IDR 200,000 for a group of up to five on Komodo or Rinca, IDR 150,000 on Padar. A sixth person means a second ranger and twice the fee. ⁴

Split five ways, IDR 200,000 is IDR 40,000 a head, about USD 2.23. It buys the person who reads the ground ahead of you and knows which dry creek bed a dragon uses in the heat. ^{4, 5}

• Keep 2 metres back from a dragon. An operator's 2026 guide lists a closer approach among the violations that draw a fine, confiscated equipment or removal from the park. ⁴
• Dive with a certification. Diving a park site without one is a listed prohibited act, alongside the IDR 25,000 dive ticket. ^{8, 3}
• Anchor deep, or on clean sand. Boats stay out of water shallower than 30 metres unless the bottom is 100 percent sand, and out of manta habitat and manta transit routes altogether. ⁸
• Slow down at the sites. Running a speedboat fast enough to endanger wildlife or swimmers at a dive or snorkel site is prohibited. ⁸

The reefs, and what you see without a dive card

Two thirds of this park is underwater, and the famous part of it is a set of named currents. Manta Alley, Crystal Rock, Castle Rock, Batu Bolong, Yellow Wall, the Cauldron and Tatawa Besar are the sites a boat plans its week around. ¹¹

Current sorts them. A Sebayur Island dive centre rates Batu Bolong and the Castle Rock and Crystal Rock pair as variable to often strong, needing a tight tidal window. Manta Point runs mild to moderate and works best at slack or rising tide. Siaba Besar stays mild and sheltered, which makes it the site for a first time in the water here. ¹⁸

Pink Beach pays a snorkeller as well as a diver. Pantai Merah sits on Komodo Island's northeast shore, about 40 km by sea from Labuan Bajo. The sand is pink because red organ-pipe coral, Tubipora musica, breaks off the reef next door and mixes into bright white carbonate sand, with red-shelled foraminifera adding to the colour. ¹⁰

The reef starts a few metres off that sand and runs about 20 metres of living coral before the water drops away, with clownfish, parrotfish and butterflyfish on it. Watch the name, though: a second pink beach on Padar, known locally as Long Beach, gets labelled Pink Beach on some maps. ¹⁰

The rules that read as fussy belong to that reef. UNESCO's listing calls the wide marine buffer around the park key to holding its integrity, and names illegal fishing and poaching as the main threats to it. ¹³ Hence the anchoring depth, the manta corridors and the speed limit. For the wider question of sleeping aboard or diving from shore, MMT runs the numbers in liveaboard or shore diving.

Komodo village, and who lives inside the park

People lived on these islands before the park existed, and they live here now. Komodo village sits on Komodo Island's east coast, with Papagarang and Rinca villages on their own islands, all inside traditional-settlement zones that predate the national park. ² The park's own visitor system states that tourism inside Komodo Village is arranged by the residents themselves. ¹

UNESCO's biosphere programme names the resident communities: Komodo, Bima and Manggarai, with Bajo and Bugis communities who arrived later, and the Ata Modo, descendants of the original people of Komodo, who live in the reserve today. ¹⁹

The Ata Modo have spent years organising around their own islands. Civil-society groups in Labuan Bajo protested a resort concession on Rinca Island in August 2018, and residents of Komodo village held their own protest in August 2019 against a government plan to remove them from the island. ²⁰ A village stop is a visit to a community with its own stated position on tourism here, so book it through people who work with the village.

On the mainland, Flores is Manggarai country. About 725,000 Manggarai live across West Manggarai, Manggarai and East Manggarai regencies, more than 90 percent of them Roman Catholic, with a Sunni Muslim minority on the coast. ²¹ The park itself is administered from West Manggarai Regency. ¹²

A week that covers the whole park

Six nights covers both dragon islands, the ridge and the mantas without a day spent doubling back. The route below follows the running times in the chart above: the closest sites first, the longest crossing in the middle, and a night back in town before the flight. ²

A longer week adds reef days at Siaba Besar and Tatawa Besar instead of more dragons, and a drone permit costs eight times an entrance ticket if you were planning to film the ridge. ^{18, 11, 3}