Originally Posted by kreeft
The reason we were looking into the two of these is because they both have airports that are easily accessible to the resort areas. Do some of these other places have easily accessible airports?
You can fly into Krabi, take a cab to the ferry pier, and then take the ferry to your destination. The link I posted above has details on different ferry schedules to the various islands in the Andaman. There are frequent flights from BKK to Krabi (don't recall city code), and the ferry to various islands will generally take an hour or less. When you decide (whether it's Krabi or Samui or Phuket), book a flight early because they fill up fast around that time.
As to the previous post that indicated Samui was a quiet tropical paradise in August -- I bet it was! But it is very crowded the week between Christmas and New Year.