Food and accommodation
Food won’t be more than about £10 to 15 a day. Assume 200 Baht (£3) for breakfast and lunch if you want a single dish and some coffee and juice, and 500 baht (£7) for dinner, if you’re dining out in restaurants. You can always get super cheap food from street vendors , like Pad Thai for around 30 baht (50 pence!), and you can dine permanently on their delicious food if you want to be super budget conscious and don’t mind eating on the street. Similarly, there are lots of supermarkets where you can buy bread etc if you want to make your own meals, although it’ll be difficult to store anything unless you have a fridge. Remember to drink LOTS of water – at least 3 litres a day.
Accommodation will be around 1000 baht a day (£15) if you want a proper hotel with a swimming pool and air conditioning. It depends on what you consider acceptable. You will always pay a premium for air-conditioning. I wrote a list of my favourite Bangkok Cheap Hotels too which will give you some pointers for cheaper guesthouses, especially around Khao San Road. Expect to pay around 200 Baht and up for a guesthouse room. For Thailand hotel bargains, you should check Agoda’s regularly updated Thailand Hotel Special Offers pages – here you’ll find Thailand hotels that have slashed their rates, or are offering free nights or freebies like a free massage or free taxi transfer to try and get your custom. See the Special Offer pages for Khao San Road hotels, Bangkok Hotel Bargains, Krabi Hotel Special Offers and Koh Samui Hotel Offers – you can choose other Thailand destinations once on the page too. Also check Travelhappy’s Thailand hotel listings too which give you a complete range of hotels from humble guesthouses to deluxe penthouse suites. The listings are easy to browse by price and location
Travel costs
Travelling around Thailand itself is quite a chunky cost that a lot of people don’t anticipate, either in terms of time or money. It’s a big country with large distances to cover if you want to go from Bangkok in the centre to Chiang Mai in the north and then the islands of Koh Tao and Koh Phangan and perhaps down to the South to Koh Phi Phi.
Buses and trains are cheap and are usually best caught on overnight trips. A train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai is around 1000 baht depending on what class you choose. A long bus journey, e.g. Bangkok to Phuket, is around 800 baht. Estimating each long journey as 1000 Baht if you go overland is probably a good rule of thumb. To get out to the islands, like Koh Tao, you will find many travel agents on Khao San Road that offer all-in-one bus and ferry tickets – these also go for around 1000 baht.
Airfares are cheap thanks to budget carriers like AirAsia.com and NokAir.com. One way flights to Chiang Mai and Phuket from Bangkok are around 2000 Baht including all taxes, which are usually more expensive than the flights themselves. There are also many special offers.
Activities
Seeing the sights in much of Thailand is relatively inexpensive. Even a visit to the Grand Palace in Bangkok or Wat Po only costs a couple hundred baht admission. Excursions are more costly, and most day trips are around 1500 – 2000 Baht. e.g. seeing the Bridge over the River Kwai and the Tiger Temple, a day trip to the temples of Ayutthaya, kayaking in Krabi, elephant trekking in Khao Sok etc. You don’t need to plan doing many of these things very far in advance – booking a day or so ahead is usually fine. But you’ll need to have some money set aside in your budget all the same.
If you want to learn to scuba dive, a PADI Open Water course on Koh Tao will cost around 10,000 Baht. You can also do it over in the Similan Islands on the west coast, but it’s more expensive as you spend 4 days on a liveaboard boat – a real adventure. The price is around 24,000 baht (£350) and includes all your food and accommodation on the liveaboard as well as your PADI course itself.
Internet access and mobile phones
Internet access is readily available in all the big cities in Thailand. Wifi access in Bangkok is also increasingly prevalent, sometimes for free. On the islands you will have much slower access to the internet. The cost is usually 1 baht a minute on average. Quality of connection can differ wildly even in urban areas, so be prepared for that. Also avoid cafes used by Thai kids for online gaming, unless you like the sound of earsplitting digitised warfare as you type…
Thai SIM cards are also readily available from Thai phone shops for around 300 Baht (£4.50). These can be found in virtually all Bangkok shopping malls eg. MBK, Emporium, Paragon, Tesco Lotus etc. Definitely invest in one of these when you arrive and don’t use global roaming with your home phone – it will cost a fortune. I recommend the 12Call Thai network for best coverage and reception. You can buy top up cards for 300 and 500 baht at all 7-11 stores. Sending texts back to the UK costs only a few baht, and voice calls burn about 50 bath a minute.
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