Hotels and accommodation

Hotels and accommodation

A brief rundown on the hotels and accommodation choices on our tours; our preferences, favoured style and criteria for selection.

As you’ll no doubt notice in much of our website ‘blurb’, our small group tours to Southeast Asia aim to combine the well-known destinations with more off-the-beaten-track ones. For obvious logistical reasons though, most tours will begin in the respective capitals; Bangkok, Hanoi, Vientiane, Kuala Lumpur etc (Sri Lanka is one exception as the more relaxing, beachside Negombo is closer to Colombo Airport than rather hectic Colombo City, while we choose to begin our Java tours in the better-placed and more user-friendly Yogyakarta rather than the sometimes overwhelming metropolis of Jakarta). We’ll generally schedule a couple of nights and some leisurely city tours to allow you to recover from the unavoidably lengthy flights and, of course, the time and temperature differences.

After some rest and recuperation time, we’ll head up country to smaller towns; Luang Prabang in the case of Laos tours, perhaps Kanchanaburi, Ayutthaya or Sukhothai in Thailand, Halong Bay on a Vietnam tour and so on. More off-the-beaten-track destinations generally feature later on in the itineraries- we won’t throw you in the deep end – whether it’s Battambang on a Cambodia tour, Ninh Binh and Trang An in Vietnam or for instance the Plain of Jars or Hin Boun if you’re joining a north or south Laos tour.

Larger cities naturally tend to have a much wider selection of hotel and accommodation options while it’s correspondingly more limited in smaller destinations. However, capital cities will not necessarily be the most popular destinations so Siem Reap and Luang Prabang for instance possess far more accommodation options than Phnom Penh and Vientiane. Hotel styles also tend to reflect the destination thus World Heritage Luang Prabang has a clutch of converted French villa hotels which are generally lacking in somewhere like modern, booming Saigon. Formerly low-key Phnom Penh used to have a range of converted old villas in gardens, (such as the much-lamented 252 Boutique or charming Hilary’s), although today the city’s construction frenzy means gardens have been replaced by tower blocks.

Our ideal accommodation

Any reader who’s been on one or more of our tours will have a pretty good grasp of what we’re looking for – our ideal choice or style – but will also be aware that such addresses are not always possible to find and on our tours, you will be staying in a wide variety of hotels and accommodation. Before moving on to the various criteria determining our choices, what we’re ideally looking for is as follows.

Small; A major advantage of genuinely small group sizes is that it allows us to select smaller hotels. However pleasant staff are in a 200-room hotel there’s never going to be the same level of contact and friendliness as in a small, boutique-style establishment.

Independent: While certain of our choices are admittedly part of small, locally-run chains, you won’t find us using, for example, a Sofitel or Holiday Inn or any other large international groups. We’d sooner give our business to a local hotelier or family.

Character: One of the issues with such larger chains is that they do tend to be somewhat similar, regardless of which part of the world the hotel is located in. Somewhere with a bit of a local feel that reflects the destination is ideal. The converted French-period house, Villa Chitdara in Luang Prabang, is a good example as is the famous, colonial, Hill Club in Nuwara Eliya.  However, this style of place is getting harder to find and there is a tendency for such small, heritage-style hotels to increasingly price themselves in the 5-star bracket.  (The award-winning Nanda Heritage in Bangkok was a popular option, although they never really recovered from COVID, as was the Victorian-style Royale Chulan in George Town – before they doubled their room rates!)

Eco-friendly: Not always as straightforward as it may seem as, to our sometimes cynical minds, eco-resort/sustainable/environmentally friendly etc have become marketing catchphrases and the reality may not always live up to the hype. Conversely, certain hotels and accommodation options have excellent policies without feeling the need to make a song and dance about it.

As we noted, the above are ideal features and obviously not always possible to find. Furthermore, even if we do find a small, independent, eco-friendly hotel or resort with character, there are still additional, important criteria to fulfill.

Hotels and accommodation – criteria

Some of these are obvious. Rooms need to be clean and comfortable and for guests’ comfort, ensuite bathrooms and air-con would be required and for guests’ convenience, Wi-Fi is a must these days. Other reasons are not so evident and when guests sometimes say, ‘The hotel across the road looks really nice – why don’t we stay there?’ – you can be sure there’s a good reason.

Reliability: This may be one of the criteria only apparent to a tour company but it is primordial. However small, charming, boutique-ish the hotel over the road appears – if they are not reliable, it’s a non-starter. We need to be confident that the rooms we booked are ready and available on the day we check-in. Inevitably, this is not always the case but even a single such occurrence is one too many. (We had our reservations bumped at short notice in a very nice villa in Battambang and on another occasion a resort in Kep. Serendipitously, our last-minute – bit of a panic – replacements of Villa Moloppor and Sabbay Kep proved even better so we’ve never looked back.)

Flexibility: Perhaps rather a vague criterion for anyone not actually dealing with the bookings but, while not primordial, some flexibility on the part of the part of the hotel or resort is very much appreciated. Organising tours inevitably means last-minute bookings or cancellations beyond anyone’s control and clearly, nobody can tell in advance exactly how many rooms in total will be required for any given tour. Can we get an extra room, can our guests have a late check-out/early check-in etcetera? (We vetoed one hotel in Siem Reap when, despite having rooms available, they made us sit in reception for an hour until their ‘official’ 12.00 check-in time came around.)

Location: As we like to build free time – and some free meals – into our itineraries, a convenient location is essential. Not so important on a short stay but for destinations such as Luang Prabang, Chiang Mai or Siem Reap for example – which usually involve a few nights’ accommodation – then it’s important to be somewhere with easy access to cafes, restaurants, markets and so on. (We can get 5-star hotels in the outskirts of Siem Reap for similar prices to downtown 3-stars but what’s the point when you’re beside a 6-lane highway and you need to organise transport every time you want to go for a coffee?)

Inclusive breakfasts: Mention of coffee brings us to another important factor; breakfasts. We can only think of one spot – a Cameron Highlands guesthouse – which doesn’t offer breakfast and in that particular case, the local cafe down the road is so good it would be worth forgoing a hotel breakfast anyway. Smaller establishments will offer a la carte breakfasts and larger hotels, buffets, with, in both instances, a choice of local or international options. For someone whose breakfast consists of 3 cups of black coffee, that breakfast item is, for us, an essential element and one of the reasons for a recent change of our Siem Reap hotel was undrinkable coffee. (It may sound petty but we had told them 10 times and guests having to go across the road to a coffee shop every morning was simply embarrassing.)

Price: The cost of hotels and accommodation does vary from country to country within Southeast Asia with, for instance, those in Malaysia being significantly more expensive than equivalents in Indonesia or Sri Lanka. However, regardless of price, we need to try and maintain consistency in accommodation style and quality as much as possible across all of our tours. The price of certain 3-star resorts in parts of Malaysia would get you a low season 5-star on certain Thai islands while we had to forgo a beautiful and extremely, reasonably priced hotel in Phnom Penh simply because it was just too fancy. In terms of price, we’re referring to the contract that All Points East has with a particular hotel – not whatever rate they may choose to publicise on their reception desk or booking site. While these are, of course, generally favourable to tour companies, in quiet times a resort may suddenly decide to offer hugely discounted rates online in a last-minute attempt to fill up a few rooms.

Overall, hotels and accommodation on our standard tours fall into the 3, sometimes 4-star, range. We’re not aiming at 5-star and our prices reflect this. Nevertheless, the remoter and more off-the-beaten-track a destination is, the less developed the tourist infrastructure is and the more limited our choice of accommodation will be. Our ideal small, boutique-style establishments with convenient locations do not exist everywhere – even sometimes in larger cities. Our individual tour pages do list sample hotels but of course, these are subject to availability and many have limited room numbers while late bookings at busy periods can be problematic whatever the size of the hotel.  Rest assured, in any location at any time we will endeavour to find you the best available all-round choice.