Tiger Kingdom Phuket

Tiger Kingdom Phuket, in Kathu between Patong and Phuket Town, sells ten minutes inside an enclosure with a tiger: you pick the animal by size, from cubs a few months old to adults over four years, and a keeper takes photographs while you touch it. There is a cheetah too. A second venue, Tiger Park, sells the same thing in Chalong.

We do not recommend either, for the reasons set out below, and nothing on this page earns us a commission. We cover them because they are among the most searched things on the island, and if you are deciding, you should have the facts: what is sold, what it costs, what the 2025 attack video actually showed, and what the one independent survey of these venues found.

What a visit is

The ticket is per animal and per person. Everyone who enters an enclosure pays, whether or not they want a photograph, and each session lasts about ten minutes. A walk-around ticket, at ฿470, takes you past the enclosures without going in. Combinations of two, three or four animals cost ฿1,720 to ฿3,520.

Before going in, visitors wash their hands and leave their bags outside, because tigers play with straps; flash and loud noise are not allowed. A trainer photographs you on your own phone, or the venue’s photographer does for ฿500. The tigers are mostly lying down: Phuket 101 reports the guides explaining that well-fed, captive-born tigers sleep through the day and wake up towards feeding time.

The size rules are the operator’s own. Anyone under 15 or shorter than 160 cm can go in only with the smallest cubs; the cheetah needs a minimum age of four and a height of 110 cm.

Tiger Park Phuket

Tiger Park is in Chalong, on Soi Yot Sane 1, the road up to the Big Buddha, about 21 minutes by road from Tiger Kingdom: 12 minutes from Kata and 11 from Rawai, 23 from Patong, without traffic. It opens 9am to 6pm daily. Its own website is an unfinished template, with no prices or packages on it.

The two venues answered the 2025 attack video together, in one statement given by Tiger Kingdom’s managing director. Viator sells no Tiger Kingdom ticket, but three Phuket city tours on it include a stop at Tiger Park. If you book a city tour, read the itinerary: we do not link those tours, and the Big Buddha is easy to reach without one.

The 2025 attack video

In late May 2025 a video of a tiger pouncing on an Indian tourist during a photo session went viral, and Indian news sites reported it as Phuket. It was not. Thailand’s Department of National Parks said the incident happened at a tiger zoo in Sri Racha district, Chonburi, on 26 May, during a “tiger walking” activity: the tourist had sat down for photographs and was holding and petting the tiger when it turned, the handler struck it with a baton and pulled its chain, and the startled tiger pounced. The man was treated overnight for minor leg wounds. The department ordered the zoo to stop tiger walking (Khaosod English, 6 June 2025).

Tiger Kingdom and Tiger Park Phuket denied any connection. In the same statement, Tiger Kingdom said its tigers are not chained or restrained, are not made to perform, eat, play or sleep under pressure, and that neither venue has had a serious accident since opening (Khaosod English, 3 June 2025). Those are the operator’s own claims, and we cannot verify them.

Why we do not recommend it

An adult tiger that will lie still while a queue of strangers sits beside it and strokes it, ten minutes at a time, all day, is an animal whose behaviour has been managed since it was a few weeks old. The product depends on that: on cubs taken from their mothers early to be hand-raised and handled, and on adults that have learned to tolerate contact. Whether the tigers are sedated, the question most visitors ask, is beside the point. The venue says they are not, and no one has shown they are; it would not change what the ticket pays for.

The one systematic look at these venues is World Animal Protection’s 2016 survey of seventeen of them, which included Tiger Kingdom Phuket:

That survey is ten years old, and conditions at any one venue may have changed since; we know of no later survey that covers them. The reasoning does not depend on it. It is the same as for elephant riding and elephant shows, set out on our elephants page: the contact is what the animal was trained for, and the ticket pays for the training.

A tiger yawning at Tiger Park Phuket, 2023

A tiger lying on a wooden platform at Tiger Park Phuket, 2023

A tiger on a log in a concrete pen, Tiger Kingdom Chiang Mai, 2015

Two young tigers on a wooden deck, Tiger Kingdom Chiang Mai, 2015

A tiger cub asleep on a wooden bench, Tiger Kingdom Chiang Mai, 2009

A tiger behind chain-link fencing, Tiger Kingdom Chiang Mai, 2009

Photographs from Wikimedia Commons: Tiger Park Phuket by Radek Kucharski (2023); Tiger Kingdom's Chiang Mai branch by Luca Nebuloni (2015) and Caitriana Nicholson (2009). Credited in full at the foot of the page.

If seeing a tiger is the point, we have no venue in Phuket to send you to: both on this page sell contact, and the words sanctuary and rescue are not regulated in Thailand, so a new name on a sign tells you nothing on its own.

Getting there

Tiger Kingdom is in Kathu, 7 minutes from Patong over the hill and 11 from Phuket Old Town, 14 from Karon and 18 from Kata without traffic, and 40 from the airport. The phone number Phuket 101 gives is 076 323 311.

For a day out in Kathu with children, Andamanda is the island’s big water park; for the rest of the island, see things to do in Phuket.