Southeast Asia small group tours – worst case scenarios

Southeast Asia small group tours – some worst case scenarios

Before starting our worst case scenarios post we’d better point out that the vast majority of our small group tours to Southeast Asia do run very smoothly and serious incidents are happily few and far between. Nevertheless, travel to remote regions on the opposite side of the World can occasionally incur problems but, aside from the more lurid worst case scenarios imagined by more nervously disposed travellers, most are very easily preempted by a few simple steps. So, while worst case scenarios is perhaps a bit melodramatic, we will run through some of the most common problems that crop up on tours, what you can do to mitigate and deal with them and how can we help?

Getting there; airlines and airports

Airports and airlines are a good source of worst case scenarios and indeed are the cause of many of the commonly encountered issues we and our guests face. That said, without reneging on all responsibility, it is an area over which, as a tour operator, we have little control. Possible flight problems include delays, cancellations and lost luggage which can result in anything from a minor inconvenience to genuine worst case scenarios. These issues are either up to you, up to the airline or simply beyond anyone’s control.

Blame for what seem to be the ever increasing number of delayed flights can be split between the airline – technical and logistical issues – and weather conditions. In the latter case, no one will argue about not taking off in conditions the pilot doesn’t consider safe and flights will be held back until the problematic weather conditions have cleared. Reasons for full-on cancellations are of course equally split between the aforementioned logistical and technical issues and – in this case – more extreme geo-climatic reasons such as volcanic eruptions, with the added factor of political unrest or military activity at the departure or arrival point. It appears to us that whether a flight is simply delayed or actually cancelled can sometimes be purely down to the airline’s spin as the 2 conditions imply 2 different sets of compensation and arrangements for passengers. We had guests departing Heathrow on a flight that was delayed for 72 hours due to ‘technical problems’. This entailed a spare part being sent to Heathrow from the airline’s main Southeast Asian hub – we won’t name names at this point – which for reasons best known to their technical department took 3 days.) Since customers were then reassigned to an already scheduled flight three days later, it’s hard to see how this can be termed a delay rather than a cancellation.

We recently booked an afternoon flight from Bangkok to Chiang Mai only to be informed that the departure had been delayed until the evening. Since the evening flight was also an existing, scheduled departure this was clearly a cancellation rather than a delay with the obvious reason being they only had enough bookings to fill one of the two planes. In this case we will name culprits – Bangkok Airways – as in our opinion this is straightforward deception and misinformation to customers for no other reason than financial gain.

There are in theory set terms and conditions for delayed and cancelled flights but they do seem to change frequently and as we said, in insurance company fashion, airlines can be very good at spin and not always easy to negotiate with. The ins and outs and areas or responsibility are too complicated to go into in detail here and, while we’ve been dealing with delayed passengers for 25 years, we still have to take each case as it happens. Note, we only have a legal obligation to assist customers who booked the ‘with flights’ tour package but have spent a lot of time and effort in recent times trying to assist guests who organised their own flights. However, please bear in mind that delayed, cancelled and rerouted flights are entirely airlines’ decisions and not All Points East’s responsibility.

An obvious piece of advice, referring to our previous post optimising your Southeast Asia small group tour, is keeping your schedule more flexible by booking an extra night or two before and after. Otherwise, with a very tight schedule even a short delay can create problems.

Passports

Passports are another of the main culprits for worst case scenarios but, we’re afraid to say, is an area that is entirely your responsibility. All we can do is to remind you that: A. your passport requires at least 6 months validity from your arrival date; B that you have sufficient blank pages left and C. that it is in acceptable condition. Case A is self explanatory and simple to check but what are considered sufficient blank pages less so. Normally a minimum of 2 pages is necessary but if you’re travelling to multiple destinations then those 2 pages can fill up quickly so we’d say don’t travel on a multi-destination tour unless you have at least 3 blank pages left. Case C is vaguer still but torn passports, missing pages and any general bad condition or defacement will not be acceptable. If there is any doubt then airlines will check your passport at the departure point since if your passport is subsequently refused by immigration at your arrival point they are responsible. Indeed all three cases should in theory be checked at the airline’s check-in desk but particularly in the cases of A and B this does not always happen. Furthermore we doubt automated check-in machines check overall passport condition and we can’t imagine they count empty pages for you while passport control of UK passports at Heathrow is pretty much non-existent. It is conceivable that if you haven’t checked the three points yourself, you may be refused entry at your destination by immigration officers who will examine your passport in person. (That really fits worse case scenarios and it’s better to be refused boarding in the first pace.)

A final passport problem that has cropped up a few times recently is guests holding dual or even multiple citizenship and passports. If you have 2 passports then you can’t change half way through the tour and decide to enter Vietnam on say a Portuguese passport and exit with a UK one or apply for a Cambodian visa with an Australian passport and present an Irish one at immigration. To limit the likelihood of worst case scenarios, please indicate your primary passport to us in the required pre-tour documents and stick to that one passport for all flights, immigration arrivals and departures and visa applications for the duration of the tour.

Visas

As you’re probably applying for a visa online then the above cases B and C will not have been checked and you’ll receive a visa even if your passport won’t get you through immigration. Visa regulations vary greatly from destination to destination as well as according to the applicants’ nationality. In our tour information we generally note requirements for UK passport holders plus US, Canadian, Australian and Western European citizens but even within those there can be different regulations. We can not cover rules for every nationality for every destination – especially since they change on a regular basis – so it is your responsibility to check current visa regulations for the destination of your choice.

Arrival and departure points for each country are noted on the respective tour pages so please check those since, to further complicate matters, certain visas may be valid for certain entry points and not others. This is particularly true in the case of Cambodian or Lao e-visas where the tour starts at Phnom Penh’s Techo International or Vientiane’s Wattay Airport respectively but often involve exist by land ports. (e.g. Laos and Vietnam tours exit at Vieng Xay/Na Meo, South Laos tours include crossing the land border with Cambodia (Veun Kham/Don Kalor), and Vietnam and Cambodia tours have a border crossing on the Mekong River at Song Tien/ Kaoam Samnor. For reasons best known to the Khmer immigration department, Cambodian e-visas are valid for the land crossing  at Don Kalor but not Kaoam Samnor. (Their website does erroneously state they aren’t valid at Don Kalor either when they most definitely are.)

China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam currently offer visa free entry for UK, US (except China), Canada, Australia and most Western European citizens with Cambodia and Laos offering visa on arrival or e-visa schemes. We can of course provide information and assistance but ultimately obtaining correct visas is the responsibility of the individual traveller.

Luggage

While hardly worst case scenarios, lost luggage can of course be a considerable inconvenience. It’s also something that occurs surprisingly frequently although consequently the airlines do have plenty of practice at locating and returning your bags. If you were just travelling from one major airport to another you could pretty confident of getting your luggage back within 24 hours but a couple of factors make this trickier in the case group tours. Our Laos tours kick off in Vientiane and Cambodia tours in Phnom Penh. Borneo tours begin in either Kota Kinabalu or Kuching, Sumatra trips in Medan and Java in Yogyakarta while Thailand and Laos tours start in Chiang Mai so these all involve an extra regional or domestic connection. Obviously the more connections involved, the easier it is to mislay luggage and the harder it is to locate it.

Secondly, being on a tour involves changing destinations on a regular basis, meaning once the missing items have been located it can be harder to get them back to their owner. Furthermore some of our tour stops can be off-the-beaten-track so getting the airline to deliver a suitcase to an eco-resort in the Sumatran jungle or remote mountain village in Laos is not straightforward. (To be fair they have always managed it – eventually – but it can take time.)

There’s no solution other than regular calls – by yourself and/or your local tour-leader, and/or our relevant office – and patience. (Polite reminders are fine but harassment isn’t necessarily going to work and bear in mind the person in the airline office isn’t the one who actually lost your bag.) You’ll have to buy essentials locally and keep receipts with compensation schemes varying according to time and airline. Good news is that a new toothbrush, pair of shorts, t-shirts and some undies won’t set you back much. As we said, perhaps not one of the worst case scenarios either, but annoying.

Health

So, you’ve arrived at your destination, got your luggage and had your passport correctly stamped, now the tour starts. Apart from the lucky few, most travellers will take at least a couple of days to acclimatise and get over their jet lag. Your system will take a while to adjust to different climate, food and water so if you’ve a headache you haven’t immediately caught malaria and if your stomach is queasy you haven’t automatically got food poisoning. We’ll cover food and tummies later but first, what are possibly your more major heath fears.

First off, in 25 years of running small group tours in Southeast Asia we’ve had, to our knowledge, zero cases of malaria and 2 incidents of dengue fever amongst guests. That’s a very low causality rate considering how many people we’ve taken around Southeast Asia over that period so bear that in mind when considering anti-malarials. There are trials for dengue fever prophylactics but as far as we know nothing is on the market at present. (We’ve personally lived in Southeast Asia for 30 year without once catching dengue which may put it in some perspective although, of course, anyone can be unlucky.) The best way to avoid mosquito born illnesses – or indeed just those itchy bites – is…to avoid getting bitten and our earlier mosquito post offers suggestions in that respect.

Over the years we’ve had a few scrapes, bruises and twisted ankles etc, but all serious health incidents we can recall occurring on tours have been due to pre-existing medical conditions. Good quality medical care is widely available in Southeast Asia but make sure your insurance cover is up to date and make sure you provide correct details to our office prior to your tour. This is a legal requirement but since we can’t check every traveller’s details, a level of trust is involved. The worst incident we can recall was a guest taken seriously ill, due to a pre-existing problem, who ran up a several thousand dollar hospital bill but who’d provided us with fake insurance details. (Precisely because the state of his health would have prevented any insurance company agreeing to provide cover.) Extremely foolish to have taken such a tour in his condition, against terms and conditions to travel without correct travel insurance and ungrateful as we had to take him to court to get the hospital fees back. An extreme and (for him), very nearly one of the absolute worst case scenarios, but a very rare one so, suffice to say, serious health issues are happily few and far between but make sure you do have correct cover.

Food, allergies and tummy bugs

Fortunately, the part of the World featured on our tours is home to some spectacular cuisines. Thai and Vietnamese in particular are well known but Malaysian, Sri Lankan, Indonesian and even lesser-known Lao and Khmer food all hold some pleasant surprises. Apart from Thai and Lao dishes most other cuisines are relatively mild and even in the former cases, chillies don’t feature in every dish. However, while stomach upsets are unfortunately not rare on tours, they can be down to a variety of reasons and you don’t need to immediately blame dodgy food or ice cubes! Time difference and change of diet – rather than bad diet – can upset your system while simple things such as downing ice cold drinks when your body’s hot can too. Never drink directly out of cans either – use a glass or straw – you don’t know where that can’s been.

Obviously there’s a big difference between a stomach upset caused by something that doesn’t agree with you and food poisoning. The former is somewhat par for the course but the more serious latter is fortunately rarer. We try as much as possible to select eateries that are popular with locals, rather than visitors. The former know best, but at the end of the day you can pick up bacteria of the more malicious kind pretty much anywhere from a 5* hotel to a street stall and the worst case we can recall, where the entire group spent half the night on the bathroom floor, was at a 4* hotel traditional dance show and dinner in Siem Reap. To be more accurate one person inn the group felt fine which was puzzling as it had been a buffet dinner and everyone had eaten different dishes until we realised that the only person who wasn’t sick was the only one in the group who hadn’t drink the draught beer! Again, hardly worst case scenarios but an uncomfortable night and fragile morning for all the beer drinkers.

We’re not qualified doctors so unqualified to provide specific medical advice but in our experience a day or so’s dodgy tummy is a bit par for the course but longer than 2 days, head to the pharmacy. Pharmacists the length and breadth of Southeast Asia speak at least a smattering of English and are very used to dealing with tourist’s intestines so don’t try and treat yourself and, above all, bear in mind Imodium cures nothing and can indeed make things worse. (But a necessary evil if you have a long journey coming up.)

Theft or Loss

The former is so rare that we nearly didn’t bother including it although preconceptions on the part of travellers unfamiliar with Southeast Asia may well include theft or robbery in their worst case scenario list. If so, then don’t as we can say categorically that you’re far more at risk of being mugged, pickpocketed or robbed in any major European or North American city than you are in a Southeast Asia one. Racking our brains we’ve come up with a snatched phone in Saigon and a stolen I-pad in Siem Reap. (CCTV later proved that the culprit in the latter case was another tourist.) There were a couple more curious incidents, including someone claiming $3000 in cash was stolen from under their chalet mattress. (Even more curiously, they claimed to not have noticed until 2 days later by which time we were back in Bangkok! Not surprisingly, local cops refused to sign an incident report.) Obviously take normal precautions; don’t wear expensive jewelry in a crowded market and avoid walking down dark alleys on your own and so-on but overall it’s not something you need to overly worry about.

Loosing items can obviously happen just as often at home but mislaying your phone, designer sunglasses, favourite scarf, camera or your credit card can happen on a tour. (Famously a certain guest dropped their phone down the toilet of a moving train on a recent Sri Lanka tour.) The most serious loss while on a tour would be your passport, entailing a visit to the nearest embassy for an emergency travel document although more often than not, mislaid passports are found in the room safe at your previous hotel.

Every traveller perhaps has their own idea of a worst case scenario and we’ve only covered a few of the more obvious, and commonly encountered ones. They’re also the most, for want of a better word, mundane and we’ve steered clear of volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, military coups, Khmer pirates, minefields or Hmong guerillas because; A. they’d fill an entire additional post and B. they’re all such remote, one-offs that we can’t take them into account and you shouldn’t be worrying about such extreme worst case scenarios either.

Overall, Southeast Asian destinations are relatively safe and hassle-free and present less worst case scenarios possibilities than many other regions. Make sure to pack your common sense and open mind and leave your more lurid worst case scenarios at home and you’ll be fine!