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Mekong Delta
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Phu Quoc
Quang Binh
Quy Nhon
Vung Tau
Thai Nguyen
Ask any hotel on this island to book you a boat day and you’ll get John’s Tour. Some receptions won’t offer you anything else at all.
I did three of their tours in a month, which wasn’t really a decision, and the one I enjoyed was the one on land. That seemed backwards at the time. You come to Phu Quoc for the water.
It made sense once I’d stood on the boat and counted.
- Quick Answer: John’s Tours Phu Quoc is the island’s default operator and the wrong default for a boat day. Their standard island tour puts you on a two-deck boat carrying up to about ninety people, which is exactly what it’s built for and nowhere near what the English listing implies. Their land tours are cheap and good.
- The Standard 3-Island Day, About $31:
- Pickup 08:15, free only in central Dương Đông between the night market and Eden Resort.
- Roughly 30 minutes out from An Thới port to the first reef.
- Hòn Xưởng, then Gầm Ghì, lunch on board, then Mây Rút Trong. Back around five.
- One bottle of water each, lunch, mask and fins. No towel, no sunscreen, no child-sized fins.
- What I’d Book Instead From the Same Company:
- Land Tour 1, around $28. Pagoda, pepper garden, fish sauce house, Bãi Sao.
- Their Luxury cano, capped at fifteen, for actual snorkelling.
- A private charter if there are four or more of you.
- The Pattern: their land tours rate around 4.3 and their boat tours 3.8 to 4.1, and the reason is the boat, not the company.
- Where They’re Good: bilingual guides, daily departures, licensed and insured, and the cheapest way to see the south of the island.
Three Days With Them
The three were the 3-island boat trip, the night squid fishing, and Land Tour 1 down the south of the island. Each of those gets its own piece eventually, so this is just the shape of them.
Land Tour 1 was the good one. Hộ Quốc pagoda, a pepper garden, a fish sauce house that smells the way you’d expect, an hour at Bãi Sao, then Sunset Town.
Long day, a lot of driving, bus completely full, and none of that mattered.
The 3-island boat day I regretted, and the island hopping piece already says I did the cheap wooden-boat version first and wouldn’t do it again.
The squid fishing was four hours, cheap and flat. I still think a night out squid fishing is worth doing and the nightlife piece says so. It wasn’t the fishing that was the problem.
The thing that stuck was that the bus had been just as full as the boat and nobody had minded.
The John’s Tours Phu Quoc Boat Is the Whole Story
Their boats are two-deck wooden things that take somewhere around ninety people at capacity. Lunch happens downstairs, the top deck has loungers on it. If you’re on the standard tour you’re on one of those, along with however many other people booked that morning.
That’s not a fault. It’s the product. Those boats exist because most of their customers are Vietnamese families and groups, and a big two-deck boat with a proper lunch downstairs is a good day out for twelve relatives.
Nobody on that side of the business is disappointed, and I’ve been on Vietnamese group boats that were genuinely fun.
The problem is what the English listing lets you assume. It says snorkel at three spots and enjoy lunch on board. It doesn’t say how many people are coming with you, and if you’ve booked snorkelling trips anywhere else in Southeast Asia your mental picture is a boat with fifteen on it.
So you get up at 7 expecting a small day and you get a large one. The snorkelling stops feel busy because ninety people are entering the water in the same place. Lunch is a shared table because that’s how you feed ninety people.
Everything works, nothing is broken, and it isn’t what you booked.
The upper deck is the part people miss. Most of the boat sits downstairs because that’s where they were pointed on the way in, and the loungers up top stay half empty for the first hour.
Go up. It’s the difference between a crowded day and a fine one, and nobody tells you.
That’s where the mediocre ratings come from, and it’s why I don’t think of them as a badly run company. They run a large-format product and sell it into a market that assumed small.
Mây Rút Is Their Beach
Every John’s boat tour finishes at Hòn Mây Rút Trong, and that’s because they own a stretch of it and run a bar there.
Once you know that, the last stop makes sense. Several of their boats land on the same sand at the same time in the afternoon, which is why it feels crowded and slightly like a resort day.
There are photo spots set up, a bar, and a lot of people.
It’s a fair trade for the price. Owning the beach is how a full day out costs thirty dollars, and the bar means lunch doesn’t have to be a picnic. But if the picture in your head was an empty island at the end of the trip, adjust it now.
Gầm Ghì is the stop that suffers most from the format. It’s the reef everyone calls the coral kingdom, it’s shallow enough that you never need to dive down, and it’s small. Put a few large boats on it at the same time and you’re swimming over a patch that has had a lot of feet on it.
Get in the water as soon as they stop. Waiting on the boat for the crowd to thin doesn’t work, it never thins.
Where the Money Actually Goes Wrong
The other thing about the standard John’s Tours is how much of your day isn’t spent snorkelling.
Pickup starts at 8:15 and the shuttle works its way down the hotel strip. Free collection only covers central Dương Đông, roughly from the night market along Trần Hưng Đạo as far as old Eden Resort, and anywhere else costs extra or you make your own way in. So a coach fills up along one 20km road and then drives south to An Thới, which is another half hour, and the first reef is 30 minutes beyond that.
Then there’s a stop or two of the commercial kind on the way. Pearl farm, that sort of thing. Twenty minutes each, and by the time you’re actually in the water it’s late morning.
You get maybe an hour of snorkelling out of a day that started at eight. That’s the real complaint, and it’s arithmetic, not bad service.
They’re Better Than the Boat Makes Them Look
Worth saying, because I don’t want this to read as a hatchet job.
The guides were the strongest part of all three days. Bilingual, patient, good at moving a large group without making it feel like being herded, and pleasant about a job that involves counting adults back onto a vehicle over and over. They’re the reason the land tour worked and the reason the boat day was bearable.
They’re also a proper company. Licensed for domestic and international travel, insured, twenty years on the island, boats and vehicles they own instead of subcontracting. On an island where plenty of boat operators are a man with a phone number, that counts.
Which tells you where the problem sits. A guide can’t make a boat smaller, can’t shorten the pickup loop, and can’t move the last stop off the company beach. Everything that went wrong on my water days was decided well above the person standing in front of us.
The Tour They Don’t Put in Front of You
Here’s what changed my mind about the John’s Tours company.
They run a Luxury trip by speedboat, capped at fifteen people, aimed at people who actually want to snorkel.
Same reefs, small boat, no coach. It exists, it’s theirs, and nobody at a hotel reception has ever mentioned it to me.
That’s not a mystery. Reception makes its money on the thirty-dollar tour, and the thirty-dollar tour is the one on the laminated sheet. If you want the other one you have to ask for it by name.
Same goes for a private charter, which for four or more people works out closer to the group price than you’d guess once you divide it.
So the honest verdict on John’s isn’t that they can’t run a good boat day. It’s that the good boat day isn’t the one being sold to you.
Which John’s Tours Trips I’d Book
Land Tour 1, around $28. I’d book this again tomorrow. You’re in a vehicle all day whoever you go with, so a full bus costs you nothing, and at that price you’re not beating it by renting a car and doing it yourself. There’s a commercial stop or two and I’d rather that than pay triple to skip them.
Their north island day with the kayaking, around $48. I didn’t do it, so this is reasoning and not experience. But it’s their best-rated trip and by the argument above it should be, because people end up spread across kayaks instead of sitting in rows. I’d book it before another of their group boat days.
The Luxury cano, or a private day. Covered above. Ask directly.
What I’d Book Elsewhere
The standard boat day. Not because it’s bad, but because small boats cost nearly the same. Their 4-island speedboat with the cable car is around $80 and the one I’d book is $83. Three dollars for half the passengers.
The squid fishing. Do it, with somebody smaller. Same water, same squid, and forty people on a boat at night with hand reels is the worst version of their format because there’s nothing to look at once the sun’s gone.
Anything where the snorkelling is the entire point. The operators capping at 8 or 10 run different routes to avoid the crowds, and that’s a different day. Same conclusion I came to in the snorkelling review.
Before You Book Anything With Them
Ask what the boat holds. Capacity is the number that decides your day and it’s the one nobody volunteers.
Check whether your hotel is inside the free pickup zone, because if it isn’t, the price you’re comparing against other operators isn’t the price you’ll pay.
Don’t book at reception. That’s how I ended up on the first of these three without comparing anything, and then booked the next two from the same company out of habit.
Bring a towel and more water than they give you, which is one bottle for a day at sea. Sunscreen too. And if there’s a child with you, bring their fins if you have them, because the ones on board start at adult sizes.
And if you do end up on the big boat, go straight upstairs. The lower deck is where lunch happens and where everyone sits by default.
So, Is It the Best Choice?
They’re the easiest choice, and on land that’s enough. For the southern tour I’d say yes without qualifying it.
On the water they’re the wrong default, and that comes from the shape of the business. Twenty years of building a fleet to move a lot of people cheaply, and a beach at the end of the route to land them on. It works. It just can’t also be the thing that gives you room on a reef.
If you’ve been out with them lately, tell me which boat you got and roughly how many were on it.
And if anyone’s done the Luxury cano, I’d like to know whether it holds up, since I’ve argued it’s the version of this company worth paying for. For what’s worth doing on the island generally, things to do in Phu Quoc has the fuller list.
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