Thailand and Vietnam Tours and Trips

The Travel Director, Siri, was passionate and knowledgeable about her country and culture. She is steeply versed in the history, agricultural, political structure, environment, and religion of Thailand.

We loved this tour of Northern Thailand. There was lots of variety in places and things to do going from city to rural settings. Highlights included River Kwai/raft house, Elephant Nature Park, homestay, Maeklong railway market and temples in Bangkok. Our guide Wit was brilliant throughout. He made the trip really enjoyable - we learnt so much from him about Thailand including history, Buddhism, food and Royalty - and he took really good care of us, always keen to ensure we having a good time. He also adapted the tour when we couldn’t visit the royal palace taking us instead to an attraction we had talked about going to ourselves. Our driver was also really friendly and helpful throughout. The accommodation was also good value for the cost of the trip Thanks so much for such a great tour and would highly recommend.

Amazing trip with a fantastic tour guide. Met some great people and saw things I would have never thought to do without the group. Would definitely recommend!

I would skip this contiki and maybe just do specific countries you're interested in. The schedule was jam-packed with temple visits which were often very similar to one another. The Vietnam portion of the trip was party heavy which was a huge contrast to the front end of the trip.

The tour was great and well organized. I have always wanted to visit Ha Long bay and the temples in Cambodia so this trip covered that and a lot of other interesting parts of Vietnam. (We booked this trip due to the conflict in Iran making it too difficult to get to our Great Britain tour. We appreciated the opportunity to choose another tour without penalty) The one night on the water in Ha Long Bay was a great choice. For me two nights would be too much. The on-island event demonstrating making rice paper provided by the cruise line was demonstrated by someone who was not really proficient at it which took away from the experience and meant only one or 2 people decided to give it a try. Our travel director in Vietnam and Cambodia both did a great job. The pace of the activities was great. There was downtime when needed as we adjusted to the higher temperatures and humidity. There were bottles of cold water and towels when needed. The air-conditioned coaches were a great refresher between sites. The history was fascinating. It would be great to get some of that history in written form to have at the time and take away as there was so much to absorb. Maybe a timeline of the main events and where the things we were seeing were constructed or took place on that timeline would be great. Not too much detail or it would end up as a book! We did an optional activity to do some enameling. This was great but I thought the supplier or tour director needed to give more instruction and information at the event. At the most basic level we were putting the enamel into the copper pattern but no samples of what could be achieved were given and some people only filled in the spaces with solid colour not thinking that the colours could be blended to create a better artistic result. In all a great tour that balanced the sights with the culture, food and history well.

This was my first time doing cost saver, and I liked that there was a lot of flexibility in the schedule. I enjoyed the included activities. I do think some of the optional experiences were a bit pricey.