What Comfortable and Excellent actually buy

Two standards, and what separates them

Everything we build is quoted at one of two standards. Comfortable sits at the top of the four-star band and the bottom of the five: a properly run hotel with a real concierge, rooms of 30 to 45 square metres, a pool, and staff who can fix a problem at nine in the evening. Excellent is the small group of houses in each country that people travel for — the colonial landmarks, the Aman and Four Seasons properties, the boutique hotels with forty rooms and a general manager who knows the guest list.

The difference between them is not the star count. It is the number of things that go right without you asking. At the Comfortable standard a late arrival is handled; at the Excellent standard it was anticipated before your flight landed. The gap in price between the two is roughly the gap between USD 250 and USD 450 per person per day on the land-only rate, and about two-thirds of that gap is the room. The pricing page breaks the rest of it down.

A third thing separates them that nobody puts in a brochure: location. In Hanoi, Bangkok and Siem Reap there are excellent hotels in the wrong place, from which every day of the itinerary starts with twenty-five minutes in traffic. Our standard applies to the address as much as to the building.

What a room costs, by country and standard

These are typical per-room, per-night rack ranges in the November to February high season, for two people sharing, including breakfast and tax. They are the numbers a room actually costs, not what it costs inside a package. Low season, roughly May to September, runs 25 to 40 per cent below these figures almost everywhere except Koh Samui, which inverts.

Read down the Comfortable column and the point of the page appears. USD 150 a night buys a very good hotel in Luang Prabang, a decent one in Hanoi and a mediocre one in Bangkok, because Bangkok has a genuine business-travel market bidding for the same rooms and Luang Prabang does not. The same money buys different rooms in each country, which is why a per-night budget is a poor way to specify a trip and a named hotel is a good one.

Cambodia has the widest spread of the four. Siem Reap can put you in a well-run pool hotel for USD 110 or in Amansara for ten times that, with very little of quality in between at the four-and-a-half-star level. Laos has the narrowest top end, simply because there are only three or four houses in Luang Prabang operating at that standard at all.

We name the hotel in the quote

Every hotel in an Indochina Voyagers quote is named, with the room category, for every night of the journey. If a property is unavailable for your dates we tell you before you pay and propose a specific alternative by name, and you approve it or you do not.

A quote that says “4-star hotel or similar” is not a quote. It is a price attached to a category, and the category is doing no work: it can be a 1990s tower on a six-lane road or a garden hotel five minutes from the Old Quarter, and the operator has reserved the right to give you either one after you have paid.

What “or similar” is usually hiding

• A cheaper property in the same star band, bought later at a lower contracted rate once your deposit is banked. The margin difference stays with the operator.
• A hotel a long way out of the centre. Star ratings in this region say nothing about address, and a 40-minute suburban location can carry the same rating as a hotel on the river.
• The oldest wing of a hotel that has a new one. Same name, same star count, rooms twenty years apart. This is why our quotes name the room category as well as the property.
• A property the operator has never inspected, contracted through a wholesaler on the strength of photographs.
• On boats, a substitution between vessels of the same brand with very different cabin counts — which on Ha Long Bay is the difference between twelve cabins and forty-six.

There is one honest use of the phrase, and it is worth acknowledging. Very early enquiries, more than a year out, sometimes have to be priced against a standard before rates are published. In that case we say so explicitly, name the hotels we intend to use, and reprice when the rates open. What we do not do is print a category and leave the choice with ourselves.

Examples of the standard, by country

The properties below are examples of what each standard means in practice, so that you can calibrate a quote against something concrete. They are not guaranteed inclusions, they are not a list to choose from, and availability at thirteen to twenty-eight days of consecutive nights is the constraint that decides most of them. Your own quote will name the hotels we have actually held for your dates.

Vietnam

At the Excellent standard in Hanoi, the Sofitel Legend Metropole and Capella. Near Hoi An, Four Seasons The Nam Hai. In Saigon, Park Hyatt Saigon and The Reverie Saigon. On Lan Ha Bay, Heritage Cruises Bình Chuẩn. The Comfortable standard in Vietnam is generally the strongest of the four countries: the country has a deep supply of well-run 60- to 120-room hotels at USD 130 to 200, and this is where a Comfortable quote goes furthest. The beach and river properties around Hoi An are the clearest illustration of the gap between the two standards.

Cambodia

In Siem Reap, Amansara, Raffles Grand Hotel d’Angkor and Park Hyatt. In Phnom Penh, Raffles Hotel Le Royal and Rosewood. Siem Reap is the one town in the region where we will argue for the Excellent standard on a Comfortable budget elsewhere, because the difference in how the Angkor days run — pre-dawn departures, a return to the hotel at eleven, a second run out at four — is more pronounced there than anywhere else on the route.

Laos

In Luang Prabang, Amantaka, Rosewood and Belmond La Résidence Phou Vao. The Comfortable band in Luang Prabang is a set of converted shophouses on and behind the peninsula at USD 90 to 170, and several of them are genuinely good. Vientiane has no Excellent property in the sense used here, which is one of the reasons our routes give it one night.

Thailand

In Bangkok, Mandarin Oriental, The Peninsula, The Siam and Aman Nai Lert. In Chiang Mai, Four Seasons Resort Chiang Mai and 137 Pillars House. On Koh Samui, Four Seasons and Six Senses. Thailand has the deepest luxury supply of the four countries and the highest Comfortable prices, which is a direct consequence of the same business-travel demand that makes Bangkok expensive in the four-star band.

Boats are a hotel category too

Two nights of a typical journey are spent on water, and boats are described in brochures with less precision than any hotel. The single number that matters is the cabin count.

A 46-cabin boat on Ha Long Bay and a 12-cabin boat on Lan Ha are sold with the same photographs, the same adjectives and often the same brand. What they are not is the same night. Ninety-two passengers means a buffet, a fixed schedule, a tender queue for the kayaks and an anchorage shared with thirty other large boats in the Ha Long core. Twenty-four passengers in Lan Ha means an à la carte dinner, a departure time that can move by half an hour, and an overnight mooring where you can hear the water. Both are legitimately “a night on a boat in the bay”. We quote the vessel by name and state the cabin count, and we sail from Haiphong into Lan Ha rather than into the Ha Long core.

Mekong ships

The Siem Reap to Ho Chi Minh City river ships are a hotel and a route bought together, and the 2026 market band is USD 3,900 to 9,000 per person for seven nights. Pandaw starts at about USD 3,879. Heritage Line runs the Jahan and the Jayavarman in the middle of that band. Aqua Expeditions sits at the top with the Aqua Mekong and its twenty suites.

One planning fact governs all of them. In low water, roughly December to July, ships cannot cross the Tonle Sap lake to Siem Reap and the final leg is flown or driven. This is normal and it is written into every serious operator’s terms; what varies is whether you were told before you booked. A Mekong cruise sold as a continuous water journey from Angkor to Saigon in February is a cruise with an unmentioned bus in it.

What we will not book

The list is short and we hold to it, including when a client asks.

• Nothing with captive animals as an attraction. No elephant camps of any description, riding or otherwise, and no hotel whose grounds include a caged enclosure.
• Nothing on the Chaweng strip that sells a beach in its photographs and delivers a road. The Koh Samui coast has a dozen properties like this and they photograph better than they live.
• Nothing we have not stayed in or inspected. If a property is new to us it is inspected before it goes into a quote, and if we cannot get there in time we quote something else.
• No hotel that will not confirm a connecting-room request in writing at the time of booking, on family journeys where connecting rooms are the reason for the choice.
• No property in Sihanoukville. We do not route there at all.

Families, connecting rooms and the truth about triples

Connecting rooms are requested and confirmed by name at the time of booking, with the room numbers or the connecting pair identified on the hotel’s side, not hoped for at check-in. This is the single most common failure in family travel in this region: an agent notes “connecting rooms requested” on a booking, the hotel treats it as a preference, and a family with a nine-year-old is given two rooms on different floors at ten at night.

The supply is genuinely limited. Most hotels in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia have far fewer connecting pairs than they have rooms, sometimes four or six in a property of a hundred, and in the November to February window those pairs are gone months ahead. On a family journey the connecting inventory, not the room rate, is what decides which hotels we can offer.

Triples

A triple room in this region is almost always a twin plus a rollaway bed. It is not a room with three real beds and it is not a family room in the European sense. In a 32-square-metre room a rollaway takes the floor space between the beds and the wardrobe, and for a fortnight with two adults and a teenager it is a poor way to live. Where a party of three is travelling we price two rooms and show you the single-supplement arithmetic, and where a party of four wants one room we say plainly which hotels can do it and which cannot.

Multi-generational parties

For three generations travelling together, the constraint moves again: ground-floor or lift-served rooms for the eldest travellers, connecting pairs for the youngest, and a hotel with somewhere to sit that is not a room. Villas and two-bedroom suites solve all three at once and are frequently cheaper per person than three separate rooms at the Excellent standard, which is not obvious from a rate sheet. Ask us to price both shapes; we do it as a matter of course on any party of five or more.

Questions travellers ask most

Read next