Do You Need a Permit for Komodo National Park? Tickets, SiOra and the 2026 Rules

Do you need a permit to visit Komodo National Park?

For normal tourism — trekking, snorkelling, sailing — there is no separate permit to apply for. There is a ticket, tied to a site and a date, and increasingly to an entry window. The park authority, Balai Taman Nasional Komodo, issues those tickets through its own digital platform, SiOra. Almost everything people call a "Komodo permit" is either that ticket or one of the special-activity authorisations described below.

This is worth stating plainly, because much published advice still describes a paper counter at the harbour, and a good deal more describes registration windows that no official source supports. The park's own ticketing page now directs visitors to SiOra for both tickets and carrying-capacity information.

What is SiOra, and what does it actually do?

SiOra was launched by Indonesia's Ministry of Forestry on 7 July 2025. The ministry's press release describes it as a digital platform that serves ticket reservation (e-ticketing) and digital self-interpretation in an integrated way. In practice it covers four things:

1. Tourism e-ticketing for the park's visitor sites.
2. Applications for permits covering research, photography and videography, drone flights, expeditions and commercial activity.
3. Site and zone information, published in more than forty languages.
4. Payment by BRI virtual account (BRIVA), bank transfer and digital wallets.

One detail contradicts a great deal of secondhand advice. The ministry's own announcement refers to a circular recommending that the reservation be completed no later than the day before the visit. Guidance claiming you must register two to four weeks ahead does not come from the ministry, and we have not found it in any official source. If an agent tells you otherwise, ask them which document says so.

Which activities need separate authorisation?

The park's published visitor protocol treats these as distinct from a normal entry ticket:

1. Drones. Flying without authorisation is prohibited. Drone permits are handled through the permit process in SiOra, not at the site.
2. Research, photography and videography, expeditions and commercial activity. These require permission in advance and are processed through the same platform.
3. Scuba diving. Not a permit as such, but the protocol requires proper certification and restricts diving to designated sites.

The protocol also sets out sanctions for breaches, ranging from written warnings to blacklisting of visitors and operators. We are not going to print a duration for those bans: the published wording is not consistently reproducible from the authority's page, and a wrong number here would be worse than no number. The operative point stands — these are enforceable rules with consequences, not etiquette.

What are the entry hours at each site?

Entry is timed, and this is where most published Komodo advice goes wrong. The windows are not uniform across the park: each visitor site has its own schedule, and the widely repeated "three sessions" scheme is one site's schedule being reported as if it were a park-wide rule. Applying it to the wrong island will put you at a jetty outside the entry window.

We deliberately do not publish the clock times here. They are set by the park authority, they have been revised, and secondary sources contradict each other and the authority's own page. Check the current published hours from Balai Taman Nasional Komodo, or have your operator confirm them, before you fix a sunrise plan around any of them.

Do you have to book a guide?

At the two main land sites — Loh Liang on Komodo Island and Loh Buaya on Rinca Island — visitors must be accompanied by a naturalist guide. The visitor protocol reinforces this: ignoring the instructions of rangers on trekking routes, walking outside marked trails, or trekking outside the timed entry window are all prohibited.

Guiding is supplied by a licensed cooperative, Koperasi Serba Usaha (KSU) Taman Nasional Komodo, which holds the guiding concession under Decree of the Director General of KSDAE No. 175/KSDAE/SET.3/KSA.3/6/2021 dated 15 June 2021, with around fifty trained naturalist guides. The published guiding tariff is IDR 200,000 per group of five. Read that as a pricing structure rather than a safety ratio — it tells you what a group of five pays, not that one guide may escort no more than five people.

How does the daily quota work?

The park operates a carrying-capacity system, and here honest reporting gets thin. The authority does not publish daily capacity figures on its website; its ticketing page states that carrying-capacity information is available through the SiOra app. A daily cap of 1,000 visitors from 1 April 2026 was announced by the Ministry of Forestry and reported widely, and it was scheduled for periodic review. Per-site and per-session headcounts circulating in the press are inconsistent with each other, and we have not been able to read a primary decree. Treat SiOra as the authority on what is actually available on your date.

What this means for your trip

On a whole-boat charter, ticketing is normally handled by the operator rather than by you at a counter, which is why charter desks collect full guest details well before departure. Three things follow:

1. Send your guest list early. Tickets are issued per person, per site, per date.
2. Do not build a rigid plan around a single entry window. Timed entry, weather and capacity together mean the sensible itinerary has alternatives written into it.
3. If you intend to fly a drone or shoot commercially, raise it when you request the quotation. That is a permit question, not a booking question, and it carries a real sanction.

LASHA is chartered as a whole boat only, home-ported in Labuan Bajo. Marine park and regency entrance charges are quoted separately from the charter rate — USD 25 per guest per night on the overnight bands, USD 35 on the two-day-one-night and day charter formats. Bookings and questions: Komodo Luxury, WhatsApp +62 811 3823 875 · [email protected].

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