What private means, and when it is the wrong choice

What private means here

One party per departure. A couple, a family, or a group of friends who already know each other — never strangers assembled to fill a vehicle. Nobody else joins your car, your guide or your table, and there is no minimum number of travellers required for the journey to run.

The word covers four separate things, and it is worth taking them one at a time. First, the vehicle: a car or minibus with a driver, used by your party alone, sized to your luggage rather than to the operator’s fleet. Second, the guide: a licensed national guide in each country, working with your party only. Third, the schedule: departure times, meal times and the order of a day are yours to change, on the day, without a supplement. Fourth, the entries and the boats: timed tickets and cabins are held in your names.

Several operators sell the first of those four and call the package private. That is a private transfer with a shared itinerary, and it costs correspondingly less. The test is easy to apply: ask whether you can move tomorrow morning from 08:00 to 10:00 after dinner tonight, and ask who has to approve it.

Three ways to see this region, compared honestly

There is no universally correct answer in this table. There is a correct answer for a given budget, party size and temperament, and for a good number of people it is not the first column. The pricing page shows where every dollar of the first column goes.

The row that decides most enquiries is the first one. If your budget is USD 150 per person per day, no amount of argument makes a private journey the right purchase, and the honest answer is that a good small-group operator will give you a better fortnight for that money than we could give you for the same.

The arithmetic of a private trip

A private journey is expensive for a structural reason, not a mysterious one. The car costs the same whether two people or eight are sitting in it. So does the guide, the driver, the fuel, the parking and the guide’s hotel room on an overnight. Those costs are fixed per day and divided by the number of travellers, which is why the per-person price falls sharply as the party grows while the trip itself does not change at all.

Here is what that looks like in our own numbers, at the Comfortable standard, land only, twin share.

Two things follow from that table. A party of six pays 22 per cent less per person per day than a couple for a journey that is identical in every visible respect — same hotels, same guides, same entries. And the Excellent standard sits above these figures, up to USD 450 per person per day at two travellers, with almost the entire increase going into rooms rather than into ground services. The twenty-eight-day Grand Indochina is the clearest worked example of both standards side by side.

It also explains the single supplement, which is where private travel treats solo travellers worst. A solo traveller carries the whole vehicle and the whole guide alone and pays a single supplement on every hotel room on top. On a twenty-one-day route that is a large number, and we say so on the phone rather than in an email at the end.

The mechanism you are actually paying for

Three specific decisions sit behind the price, and each of them costs us money we could keep.

A national guide in each country

A guide who travels the whole route with you knows one country properly and reads the other three out of a book. Our journeys change guide at every border: a Vietnamese national guide in Vietnam, a Lao guide in Laos, a Khmer guide in Cambodia, a Thai guide in Thailand, each licensed in their own country and each living in it.

The cost of this is real. Four guides mean four briefings, four handovers and four people who have to be free for your dates. The benefit is that when you ask a question about land ownership, or a funeral you have just walked past, or why a particular temple was rebuilt in 1957, you get an answer from somebody who grew up with it rather than a paraphrase.

Guides are paid a day rate

Every guide and driver is paid a fixed day rate by us, whether you buy anything or not. This is why there is no lacquer factory, no silk workshop, no gem showroom and no jewellery stop in any of our itineraries. Those stops exist because a guide on a low base rate earns a commission on what the party spends, and the twenty minutes you were promised becomes ninety. Removing the commission removes the incentive, and removing the incentive removes the stop.

Drivers drive

The driver is not a part-time guide, and the guide does not drive. A driver whose job is the road is watching the road, and on National Road 6 or the Hai Van Pass that is not a small thing. It also means the guide can walk you through a market and meet the car on the far side, rather than everybody returning to where the vehicle was parked.

When a small-group tour or independent travel is the better buy

This section costs us enquiries and it stays on the page, because the alternative is selling a fortnight to somebody it does not fit.

Under about USD 200 per person per day, buy a group tour

Below that figure a good small-group operator will beat us outright, and it is not close. Their fixed costs are spread across twelve to sixteen people instead of two, so at USD 160 a day they can put you in hotels and vehicles that we could only reach at USD 300. Trying to build a private trip at that budget produces a worse trip, not a cheaper one: the hotels drop two categories, the guide is the cheapest available rather than the best available, and the internal flights become whatever remains at the back of the aircraft.

Under USD 200 per person per day we decline the enquiry and say why. That is not a negotiating position.

Solo travellers are usually better off in a group

A private journey charges a single traveller for the whole vehicle, the whole guide and a single supplement on every room. A small-group departure spreads the ground costs across the group and often offers a room-share, which removes the supplement entirely. For one person travelling alone the group is normally both cheaper and more sociable, and the arithmetic is not marginal — it is frequently a factor of two.

If you want to change plans daily, travel independently

A private journey is flexible within a day and rigid across the trip. Hotels are held and paid, internal flights are ticketed, cabins are in your names, and four guides have your dates blocked. Moving from Hoi An to Da Lat on the morning of day nine is not a phone call, it is a rebuild with cancellation costs attached.

Travellers who genuinely want to decide each week where the next week goes should book their own flights, book hotels two or three days ahead, and hire a guide by the day where they want one. Vietnam and Thailand are both straightforward to do this in, transport is good and cheap, and the freedom is worth more to that traveller than anything we sell. Say the word and we will tell you which three or four legs are worth booking in advance anyway — the Lan Ha boat, the Vientiane train, the Siem Reap to Luang Prabang flight — and then leave you to it.

Under twelve days, go to somebody else

A journey shorter than twelve days across this region spends too much of itself in transit for the private structure to earn its cost. Two countries in ten days is four internal flights and six hotel check-ins, and at that pace the guide changeovers become the trip. Short packages are a different business and other operators run them well.

What we are honestly bad at

The limits below are permanent. They are not challenges to negotiate and they are the fastest way to work out whether to write to us at all.

• English only. No guides in French, German, Spanish or Italian, in any of the four countries.
• No journeys under twelve days, and nothing at all under USD 200 per person per day.
• No parties over eight, and no shared departures — if you are two, you travel as two.
• No Myanmar and no Sihanoukville, on any routing.
• No elephant riding and no elephant camps. No orphanage visits. No staged hill-tribe villages.
• No gem, silk or lacquer commission stops, because nobody in our operation earns anything from them.
• No coach tours and no cruises with two hundred cabins. The river ships we book have twenty suites, not two hundred.

If two or more of those rule you out, a different operator is the right answer and we will usually name one. If none of them do, the next step is a set of dates, a party size and the two or three things you would most regret missing. Read when to go first, then write to us through the contact page.

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