Gyaan Section Cheapest Option : Get on to makemytrip.com or yatra.com (
or any other such travel website) and look for 3D/4D/5D trips to Bangkok and/or Phuket and/or Pattaya. Or call up any agent you know to come up with deals of such a similar trip. You'll get a completely end-to-end planned trip (
including flights, airport drops, hotel bookings, sight seeings, etc). Basically the website/agent gets his cut from the hotels/airlines/sight seeing venues as he's getting business for them. You get a decent trip at the cheapest rate. For the veggie/food conscious, you can get your requirements ensured in advance. But then most of the time you'll have to travel with the group and can't detour to do anything specific that you would have wanted to. IMO, best suited to families with kids.
VFM Option : Talk to any agent to get you the best possible deal on flights + hotel booking + sight seeing venues. Remember to tell him that the deal has to be flexible on the hotel choices and the venues as per your needs. Research the hotels & venues online and decide/negotiate accordingly with him. You wouldn't get the cheapest deal, but then you'll get a better deal than going all on your own.
I'm da Boss Option : Research your airlines options on various travel websites and book accordingly. Research your hotels on websites like tripadvisor, agoda, virtualtourist, etc and book them online. Plan your itinerary and work out the smaller stuff such as airport pickup/drop options, visa requirements, food aspects, etc. Book well in advance to get the best deals. However do note, you won't get as good deals (for hotels/flights) as the agents do.
Da Backpacker Option : At the risk of sounding like the sasu-maas in the soap saga, I'll have to say it again - book the no-frills flights well in advance. From my experience, atleast 3-4 months if you are targeting budget no-frills airlines. For trips to SE Asia, check out Tiger Airlines, Air Asia (and others). You'll get excellent round trip quotes. Research on public transports/sharing options (
Thailand has an excellent inter-city bus network) and use them accordingly. Check out rates on hotels through travel websites and call them up and get better rates (
will provide example on this). If you are traveling during the off-season, then IMO don't book, just reach the venue and bargain hard. Look for hotels having (
sharing rooms with) bunker beds, or similar budget hotels that provide other additional services too (
coin operated washing machines, inhouse micro-wave ovens, etc)
Our Experience
Although a trip was in discussion since the last 4-5 months, we decided on this only by late November. For reasons unknown, I choose not to go through the agent option and decide to all the bookings on my own. The no-frills airline quotes had gone up, almost matching the rest. Also since this was the first joint travel trip for the both of us, I decide to book a good international airline, Thai Airways, ignoring the cheaper Indigo, Bangkok Airways and Air India; a good 3.5k (per person) more than the cheapest option. Also the lady was put up in Kolkata, so that included an additional 8k Kolkata - Mumbai round trip.
Goof-up : Booking a few months in advance would have saved us by a cool 5-10k per person. A friend who traveled to Bangkok less than a month earlier had flight tickets in the range of 10k per person. Of course he had it booked via an agent a good deal in advance.
Costs :
- Mumbai - Bangkok : 32k (X2)
- Kolkata - Mumbai : 8k (X1)
Goof-up: Thai Airways were considerably cheaper from Kolkata, by a cool 4k per person. Also so was the Mumbai - Kolkata round trip. Plus the flight time would have gone down by atleast 2 hours one side.
We do an online check-in and reach the airport, a good 3 hours before the departure time, like good kids. However the Thai counters are surprisingly empty, a clear indication of the market share going towards the budget airlines which are filled with busy counters.
The immigration counter requires you to fill up a form, and of course neither of us arrive with a pen. The cheapest pen available in the nearby shops is at a mind-boggling price of 300 INR. Also none of the friendly faces around gives us confidence to borrow a pen, so we choose to buy a coffee at the nearby coffee shop in order to avail a pen to fill up the forms. People planning to go overseas, please kindly carry a pen with you.
Once the security check is done, we while our time in the duty free section waiting for the boarding call. Surprisingly there is a good amount of duty free shops available at the Mumbai airport. This is no where close to the setups at international locations, but still it is definitely better than what I expected.
Also we have free wi-fi available so it ain't very soon before the laptops come out. While I head straight (no points for guessing) to TBHP, she heads towards the social websites. In retrospect I wish we didn't have the internet facility, atleast I would have spent more time in taking a few pictures of the airport and the surroundings.
The flight takes a duration of 4 odd hours during which they bombard us with food and liquor. The food is extremely good
(both veg & non-veg meals) and we amaze ourselves by finishing the entire meal at 4 in the morning! A result of which we land in Bangkok, feeling extremely sleepy and a bit dazed.
Now before you can claim your checked-in luggage, you need to pass through immigration. Also there are two different sections, the main section being for the visa holders with sufficiently large queues and one smaller section for the
Visa-on-Arrival option. However like sheep we follow the rest of the group and stand in line behind the visa holders. A good 30 minutes later, once our turn arrives, we are informed about the other section.
Immigration counters for Visa holders
The visa comes at a significant charge, 1000 Baht. Also they accept the payment only in cash, and in Baht currency only. There are exchange currency counters at every corner in case you don't have Baht with you. The documents required for the visa are
- Passport (with more than 6 months expiry period)
- 1 Passport sized photograph
- A filled out Immigration form (form available at counter)
- A filled out Visa application form (form available at counter)
- Boarding Pass
- A copy of your return ticket & hotel booking
Thankfully the process is quite simple and gets over within 15 minutes. But then the next question arises - what about your baggage. There are close to 20 conveyor belts and we have absolutely no idea about the one with our luggage. Also it is close to an hour since we landed and we start assuming all kinds of problems. However this saves the day
Baggage information display
We move towards counter 6, our designated belt and as we imagined, we are the last one to pick up the luggage.
However it seems we aren't the only ones late in picking up luggage. The adjacent belt has unpicked up luggage from a Dubai-based flight - probably some poor souls like us who have yet to get their immigration act completed.
Meanwhile I finally get some good shots of the gorgeously clean airport - a far cry from the Mumbai airport we just left a few hours back.