Answers to some of the frequently asked questions below.
Which language is spoken during the tour?
All tours are offered in English language only, all our tour guides are fluent in English. We currently do not offer tours in other languages.
Does the guide show us all places during the tour?
Yes, our tour guide joins you at all places and gives you background information at each place. We work only with professional and fully licensed tour guides. We do inform our guide to be careful with overloading clients with historical information. Essential for our tours is that we want to show the local life, culture, and traditions. We select our guides based on attitude and social skills, many times we hear that clients felt like travelling with a friend.
Is advance booking needed?
Yes, this is strongly recommended. We commit ourselves to organize quality tours, and this is accomplished partly by working with a small team of professional tour guides. Since every tour is guaranteed private, it often happens that we do not have a guide available for requests on short notice. In low season most clients book our tours 1 month in advance, for peak season it is in average 3 months. The availability feature of the booking system on our website may not be always up to date as our capacity can vary, when a date shows green on the booking form it does not automatically mean that we have a guide available.
Do you offer join-in tours?
No, we organize private tours only, it’s only you and our tour guide on tour. There is one exception for this, we do accept bookings from groups that are formed on the CruiseCritic roll call forums (this is only applicable for clients arriving by cruise ship in Laem Chabang or Klong Toey port).
Why a variable price per person?
For private tours it’s common that prices vary with your group size. If you travel alone, you will have to cover the full fee of tour guide, boats, and transport by yourself. The larger your group, the lower the price per person. The booking form will show you the total price for the tour after you enter the group size, date and tour options.
What is included in the price?
We offer our tours all inclusive. Typically this means that all guide service, transport, entrance fees, boat tours, water, soft drinks, coffee, tea, snacks, fruits are included. See the specifications table on each tour page for exact details. There will not be any unexpected optional items.
Most of the tours also include a very nice freshly cooked Thai lunch at good quality local restaurants. Restaurants are carefully selected. First of all, they must offer authentic Thai food as its such an important aspect of our culture. They must also have good hygiene standards to make sure that food is safe to eat.
What does local transport mean?
By local transport we mean any form of public transport that can be used. This can be tuk tuk, water taxi, skytrain, subway, public taxi, whichever is most convenient and gets us quickest from A to B without being stuck in traffic. Exploring like a local is the most fun way to see Bangkok, for many it adds an unforgettable experience to the tour. For the tours with local transport we limit the group size to 6 participants. We recommend minivan when booking tours with small children, elderly participants, or participants with limited mobility.
What type of cars do you use?
For the tours where we specify transport by minivan, this is a luxury air-conditioned minivan with upgraded interior. We work with a small team of carefully selected reliable and safe drivers. Photos of one of our minivans are shown on this Facebook gallery. Most minivans have 9 very comfortable seats, and group size is limited to 9 participants for tours with minivan that start and finish in the city. For shore excursions we limit the group size to 7 participants. If you come with a larger group, we can split into smaller groups with each having its own tour guide and driver. Quality of tour is important, every participant must be able to receive personal attention from the tour guide, and this made us decide that we do not use a large bus for our tours.
Do you offer tours with elephant riding or tiger cub feeding?
We have contemplated this question many times, do we need to offer activities with animals to entertain tourists? We strongly feel that animals should not suffer for entertainment of tourists. We have therefore decided to say no, and ban all activities with animals from our tours. Unfortunately tourism has had a bad impact on animal welfare in Thailand.
The other side of the story is that we can not simply make all elephants and their keepers without jobs. Many families depend on the income generated by activities with elephants, some do it in a good way, and some in a bad way. There are many elephants and this majestic animal is one of the national symbols of Thailand. We therefore do encourage animal friendly activities for your holiday in Thailand. The more people ask for it, the more places will start offering sustainable activities with animals. For some ideas about how to interact ethically with elephants, check this Lonely Planet page.
What happens if it rains?
Thailand has a tropical climate and that comes with tropical showers (warm water). In raining season the rain falls typically late afternoon and at night, and is mostly a short and strong shower, and after a short while it is dry again. For Bangkok the most frequent rains occur during the month of September and October. Tours will continue, if we face a shower during the tour, we will take a break for coffee or tea (our treat). If it rains longer our guide will arrange a rain poncho for you, but this is rarely needed as longer rains are not common around Bangkok.
Are participants covered by insurance during a tour?
Anyone who organizes tours in Thailand is legally required to have a liability and accident insurance, it is checked every 2 years by the Tourism Authority of Thailand when the tour operator license needs to be extended. We comply with the regulations and have insurance for our tours. If you’d like to be covered by our insurance, we do need to receive personal details of the participants after the booking is confirmed. We do always recommend arranging your own comprehensive travel insurance. See more information about our insurance coverage at the page with terms & conditions.
Do you have a privacy policy?
We do not share any of our client information with third parties**. We do not publish photos of our clients on social network pages of our company, not everyone needs to know that you are on holiday. Some of our guides and drivers may post on their personal social network pages, but you are free to ask them not to do it. If privacy is important to you, do let us know during the booking and we will inform our team accordingly.
** There is only one exception, if you like to be covered by our liability and accident insurance we will need to share your details with our insurance provider (currently AXA).
How do you protect personal information?
To make a booking on this webpage you only need to enter your name, country, email, and your hotel location. No password or account is needed on our web site. All pages on this website use an encrypted connection (https). Credit card information is not entered or stored on our web server. For online payments we use PayPal and only use their secured pages for payments. Email is not stored on our public web server, we use a professional paid service where all email is stored securely. All email software connect to the mail servers via encrypted connections (tls/ssl). At our office we only use legal software and all software is kept up to date with security updates.
How to book a tour?
More information about the booking process at the how to book page.
Any further questions?
Every tour listing has a question form and we will be happy to answer further questions. Start browsing our tours at the Day trips and Shore excursion pages.