I’ve finally managed to finalize the big chunk portion of our Thailand trip later in Dec this year with flights and accommodation costs secured.
Our family have been a huge fan of venturing various parts of Thailand since we have our children since it’s pretty near to where we are. In the first year, we went to visit BKK and Huahin and in the second year, we visited BKK and Krabi. It was such a memorable experience for us and the kids that we wanted to go back there again.
This time round, we’ll be venturing BKK and Phuket.
We’ll be traveling with our two children, 3+ and 6 months, and we’ll be bringing our domestic helper and nanny as well to the trip, so that’ll makes it 6 of us including myself and my wife. This also helps to waive the foreign levy when they were out overseas for a period of 7 days or more during the traveling period.
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| Life’s a Total Beach! |
Flights
Like some of the other bloggers like Kevin, I’ve been on a project miles accumulation since about a year ago. My wife charges all of her business expenses to this card and being overseas meant that we get double the miles we are entitled to. Just over a year now and we’ve accumulated slightly above 160k miles so far, which we would be hoarding for the larger trips when my kids get older.
We managed to book via Jetstar for our trip this time to SIN-BKK and PHU-SIN. We compared the prices across the budget airlines and also the timing of the departure and arrival and felt this was the best case of all for value. It wasn’t easy traveling when you have two young toddlers with you around and we’ve got to accommodate that.
We are also going during the school holidays, so there wasn’t any steal deals in particular.
It was also funny that the booking a seat for the infant (less than 2 years old) was actually cheaper than tagging the infant to my seat. So we proceeded to book a seat for our infant. We had funny experience about this in the past, where you’ve got to remind the admin to issue an infant ticket during the check-in process.
Our flights amounted to $1,262.67 for the 6 of us on this one.
In addition, we also managed to secure a Thai Airways flight in our interim flight from BKK-PHU for THB 10,000 (~$407).
Total flight costs $1,669.67.
Accommodation
For accommodation, since we are traveling in a relatively large group, we needed to avoid the traditional hotel rooms where it can only fit 2 or 3 people max.
This time round, we managed to book our accommodation via an airbnb. I’ve get to know this young lady who’s kindly willing to offer a 3 nights complimentary stay for a return on reviewing her apartment after we stayed. I agreed to such deal since it managed to save us $388 worth of accommodation stay at BKK.
The apartment is also located at the Pratunam area so it’ll be easy for us to move around. Most importantly, it has 2 queen beds which can fit the 6 of us nicely and we can also cook in the house.
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| Airbnb Apartment Near Pratunam |
For our accommodation stay at Phuket, we managed to book a family suite at the Holiday Inn Patong for 2 nights for THB12,107.40 (~SGD 493). This was booked straight from the hotel website itself after we found out that it offered a discount if we booked direct instead of through a booking website agent.
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| Connecting Room for the kids… There’s another room for the adults |
We also booked another suite room at the 5-star Avista Hideway Sofitel which was going for like a crazy discount at one of the booking website, Hotels.com. For 2 nights stay, it’ll costs us $521 which I thought was quite a good deal considering it costs $800 to $1k on usual days.
Our total accommodation for the 7 nights sums up to about $1,014.
Food & Shopping & Transportation
We are not planning to do any major shopping and food galore since we’ve been across so this should more thrifty for the section. Still, because we have two young kids, we have to settle for a cleaner food condition and that means decent restaurants most of the time.
The other only thing we are planning is to revisit the zoo and safari again in BKK, to bring both my children to see the animals.
We figured out about SGD80 x 7 = $560 would be more than a comfortable range on this one.
Summary
We expect to spend about $3,200 during our trip this time and we haven’t been able to cut down much on our travel since we had our kids (and helper) with us.
Most of the costs from that amount have been amortized and prepaid, so the good news is we’ve accounted for those expenses which has hit us, past tense.
Still, I think we’ll had fun and that’s about one of the most important thing for us.
Thanks for reading.
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Thailand is one of my top destination to visit at some point. The food, the culture and the crazy snorkeling are all top notch. It seems like it very affordable. I hope it's still affordable when we manage to get a trip there.
The 12 hours time zone different would be a challenge, so I hope to go when we're fully retired.