Andaman Trip Planner: Six Days, Three Islands, One Rule

The Andaman Islands are roughly 1,200 kilometres from Chennai and about four hours by air from most Indian cities. Getting there is the easy part. The actual difficulty of any andaman trip planner has almost nothing to do with the flight and everything to do with what happens after you land in Port Blair — specifically, the inter-island ferry schedule and the gap between when you want to leave for the next island and when the boat decides to go. Most first-time visitors either under-plan the logistics (skipping Port Blair too quickly, booking Havelock without checking ferry departure times) or over-plan the sightseeing and arrive with a beach list too long to be useful. Both problems are avoidable, but only if you build the itinerary around the boats first and the attractions second.

ℹ️ The Six-Day Structure

Port Blair on arrival (days 1 and 2), Havelock Island mid-trip (days 3 and 4), Neil Island on the way back (day 5), Port Blair again before your return flight (day 6). Ferry bookings before hotel bookings. One day of buffer. That's the sequence.

The default mistake is treating Port Blair as a transit hub — a place you move through on the way to the 'real' islands. Port Blair warrants at least a full day, ideally two. The Cellular Jail evening light and sound show is genuinely worth attending; book tickets at least a day in advance because the evening slot fills up quickly during peak season. Ross Island, North Bay, and Viper Island are accessible by government ferry from Aberdeen Jetty, collectively worth a half-day. Corbyn's Cove is the nearest beach and worth an evening walk. Port Blair also has the best food options in the entire island chain — something you'll notice when you're on Havelock at 9 PM looking for dinner that isn't resort-priced.

The second mistake is underestimating inter-island travel time. The government ferry from Port Blair to Havelock takes two to two-and-a-half hours on calm days, with most departures leaving Phoenix Bay Jetty between 6 and 8 AM. Private speedboats cut that to under an hour but cost significantly more. Either way, your 'arrival day' on Havelock effectively starts at noon after the jetty queue, boarding, and crossing. A traveller who books three hotel nights on Havelock expecting three full beach days will have two-and-a-half, at best.

Arrive on Day 1. If your flight lands before noon, an afternoon visit to North Bay Island or Ross Island is feasible — jetty ferries run through the day from Aberdeen Jetty near the waterfront. Book the Cellular Jail light and sound show for Day 1 evening if your arrival timing allows.

Day 2 covers the remaining Port Blair items: the Anthropological Museum is an hour well spent. Corbyn's Cove beach in the afternoon is a reasonable way to ease into the trip. Chidiya Tapu, about 25 kilometres south of Port Blair, is worth making the effort for at sunset — it's quieter than any of the more visited beaches in the chain. The town also has decent options for stocking up on sunscreen, snorkelling gear, and anything else you forgot to pack. Havelock does not have a pharmacy that stocks sunscreen in useful quantities. This is not a rumour.

Book your Port Blair–Havelock ferry ticket before Day 2 ends. Government ferry bookings open online through the Andaman administration portal. Morning departures on peak-season routes — November through January in particular — fill up days in advance.

Take the morning ferry on Day 3. Confirm the departure time the evening before. Havelock — now officially called Swaraj Dweep, though almost nobody uses that name when booking anything — is larger than it looks on a map. The jetty, the main resort corridor, and Radhanagar Beach are spread across the island with meaningful distances between them.

Radhanagar Beach is on the west side, roughly 30 minutes from the jetty by auto-rickshaw or rented motorbike. Go in the afternoon and stay for sunset. The beach is wide, largely undeveloped, and the right kind of quiet. Elephant Beach, accessible by a 20-minute boat ride from the jetty area, is the better option for snorkelling and glass-bottom kayak activities. Most boat operators run morning trips.

Day 4 is for whatever didn't fit on Day 3. Havelock rewards a slower pace — the version of the trip where you spend three hours on one beach and eat at the same shack twice is not the underperforming version. Scuba diving operators on the island are well established and run both half-day courses and full certification programmes. If a structured dive is on the list, book it on Day 3 to secure a slot for Day 4.

Neil Island — now officially Shaheed Dweep — is smaller, quieter, and regularly skipped by travellers who run out of time. If you've structured six days correctly, you have a night here. The ferry from Havelock to Neil takes about 45 minutes to an hour.

Neil has three main beaches: Bharatpur near the jetty, Laxmanpur to the west, and Sitapur on the east side. Laxmanpur Beach at sunset, with the natural rock bridge nearby and fewer people than Radhanagar, is the highlight. The island is small enough to cover on a rented bicycle, which is both the most efficient and the most enjoyable way to get around.

Day 6 is the return: morning ferry from Neil to Port Blair, afternoon flight out. Build at least a two-hour buffer between ferry arrival and your departure flight. Ferries run on their own schedule, and if the Day 5 crossing from Havelock to Neil ran late or conditions pushed timings, you do not want to be sprinting through Port Blair with damp snorkelling gear.

The Andaman monsoon runs from June through September. The islands technically stay open year-round, but ferries get cancelled with some regularity during heavy weather, underwater visibility drops substantially for diving and snorkelling, and the version of Andaman most people are planning for becomes harder to guarantee. October is when conditions settle — the sea calms, the sky clears, and the trip matches what the photographs suggest.

December through February is peak season. Prices go up, resorts on Havelock fill up weeks in advance, and ferry tickets on the Port Blair–Havelock route should be booked four to six weeks out at minimum. March and April are the shoulder months — good weather, slightly fewer people, easier bookings all around.

May sees increasing humidity and the early edges of the pre-monsoon. Still manageable, but underwater visibility for diving and snorkelling starts to drop noticeably. If your travel dates are flexible, October–November and March–April give the most reliable combination of good conditions and available bookings.

💡 Book Ferries Before Hotels

Ferry tickets on the Port Blair–Havelock route sell out during peak season before hotel availability becomes an issue. Get your ferry dates confirmed first through the Andaman administration's online portal, then build your hotel nights around those fixed points. Doing it the other way around is how people end up stuck in Port Blair with a Havelock hotel that's two days away.

Rule of thumb: build your entire andaman trip planner around two fixed bookings — the outbound ferry from Port Blair to Havelock, and the return ferry from Neil Island or Havelock back to Port Blair in time for your departure flight. Everything else fills in around those two anchor points.

The travellers who have a genuinely good Andaman trip are not the ones with the most thorough day-by-day plan. They're the ones who confirmed their ferry bookings before anything else and left one day of slack somewhere in the middle. The islands handle the rest without much additional intervention.

If you're building an Andaman trip from scratch, start a conversation with Vani on G8Trip. She'll ask for your travel dates, group size, and priorities — beach-first, dive-focused, family mix — and produce a day-by-day plan covering all three islands. She can also search live hotel availability across Port Blair and Havelock, so you're not cross-referencing three booking aggregators at once.

What Vani doesn't handle: government ferry ticket bookings go through the Andaman administration portal directly, not through G8Trip. Vani can tell you where to book, which routes fill fastest, and what to look for — but the ferry reservation is yours to make. That's worth knowing before you arrive expecting a one-click end-to-end booking. (No AI travel assistant has integrated the Andaman government ferry system yet. Some things still require a government website and a reasonable amount of patience.)

The Andaman Islands are largely forgiving. The kind of destination where showing up and figuring things out as you go mostly works — for the beaches, for the food, for which boat trip to take in the morning. Except for the ferry. The ferry does not forgive, and neither does the departure board, which, in our experience, nobody reads carefully until the queue at the jetty is longer than expected and the next departure is forty minutes away.

Sort the ferries first. The rest of Andaman sorts itself out.