Malaysia · Labuan
Where to Stay in Labuan, Labuan
Labuan, officially Bandar Labuan and also called Victoria, is the capital of the Federal Territory of Labuan off the north coast of Borneo.
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Where to stay in Labuan
The right area depends on your trip — here's what each neighbourhood is best for.
Victoria holds the island's rooms. The town occupies the south-east corner of Labuan, which puts Labuan Museum and the Labuan Maritime Museum inside one compact area, and almost every bed in the Federal Territory sits within it. Little lies elsewhere.
Labuan is an island group rather than a single town, so the choice is less about which quarter than about whether a stay wants the capital at all. Museums decide the walking. A room near the Chimney Museum and the Labuan Maritime Museum covers the town's fixed sights on foot, which is the practical argument for staying in Victoria rather than out along the island's edges.
Distances anywhere stay small. Bandar Labuan and Victoria name the same place, so a booking under either lands in the same corner of the island. Borneo lies across the water.
The island group sits off the north coast of Borneo, so a stay here is a stay offshore, reached by crossing rather than by driving in from anywhere on the mainland. That shapes the timing. Arrival and departure both run on scheduled crossings, which is worth building into a booking, and the town in the south-east corner is where those connections put people down.
About Labuan
Three museums carry the record.
What is Labuan known for?
Labuan Museum, the Chimney Museum and the Labuan Maritime Museum hold most of what the town sets out for visitors, and between them they account for the island group's own past and its life at sea. The name honours a queen. Bandar Victoria is the Malay form in common use, given for the reign of Queen Victoria, and the town answers equally to Bandar Labuan and to Labuan alone.
What are the main landmarks in Labuan?
Three museums and one chimney. Labuan Museum sets out the island's own record, the Labuan Maritime Museum handles the sea, and the Chimney Museum is built around the chimney it takes its name from. The museums make the visit.
Anyone crossing to the Federal Territory of Labuan for a day tends to work through them in turn, and the three together make the ordinary day out here.
What is the history of Labuan?
The name came from a reign. Bandar Victoria honours Queen Victoria, and the shorter forms Victoria and Bandar Labuan have run beside it ever since, so the same town appears in the record under three headings depending on the source. The year given is 1946.
That date fixes the beginning the record keeps for the town, and everything the museums show sits either side of it. Labuan became a federal territory. Victoria holds the capital of that territory, which gives a small island town the administrative weight of a unit answering directly to Malaysia rather than to any surrounding state.
The corner has not moved. Victoria still occupies the south-east of Labuan, and the territory has filled in around a capital that stayed where it was put. Three museums keep the story.
Labuan Museum, the Chimney Museum and the Labuan Maritime Museum divide the past of the island group between civic history, one landmark structure and life on the water. Sea traffic explains the last of those. An island group off the north coast of Borneo lives by what crosses to it, and the maritime collection in Victoria is the part of the record that admits as much.
Where is Labuan?
Labuan is a group of islands. The territory lies off the north coast of Borneo, and Victoria occupies its south-east corner, which places the capital at one end of the group rather than at its middle. Water surrounds everything here.
Malaysia administers the Federal Territory of Labuan as its own unit, so the boundary that matters on the ground is a coastline rather than a line drawn with a neighbour.
What is the climate of Labuan?
Being an island, Labuan takes its weather from the sea. Labuan sits in the tropical band off the north coast of Borneo, where water on every side keeps the range of temperature narrow and the air heavy in every month of the year. Rain arrives off the water.
Squalls cross the island group and clear, and the wetter stretches of the year matter more to crossings than to anything happening in Victoria itself.
How do you get to Labuan?
Everything comes by sea or air. Labuan is an island group off the north coast of Borneo, so arrivals cross water to get here, and Victoria in the south-east corner is where that traffic lands. Names on a ticket vary.
A booking may read Victoria, Bandar Labuan or simply Labuan, and all three deliver the same destination inside the Federal Territory of Labuan.
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Updated August 2026