Travel Review: Luxury Thailand Vacation, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Koh Phi Phi, Cooking Class, Bike Tour

This travel agent did a great job coordinating our travel goals with available events.

She did a great job choosing our guide and driver in Bangkok.  Our guide added so much to our trip and provided such personalized attention, offering suggestions to optimize our time there and navigated the local culture to make the best use of our time and minimize inconveniences. He is also funny. Our driver was a safe driver and had cold water and washcloths for us after every stop.  They were always on time. They were fantastic and everyone should hire them.

Our guide and driver combo in Chang Mai was less impressive.  We felt like our driver was somewhat reckless, although many drivers drove that way.  Our guide offered little information spontaneously on the first day( better on the second day), and the guide and driver, husband and wife, had a lot of personal conversations on our drive from Chang Rai to Chang Mai instead of engaging us.  There also seemed to be a miscommunication regarding the itinerary.  We had planned for a bike ride in the morning and then a walking tour of the lost empire in the afternoon one day with our travel agency.  The guide told us that the bike ride was of the lost empire and then we had the afternoon off to stay at the hotel, explore on our own.  The bike ride was actually in the countryside like we had planned and was wonderful, but we never did see the lost empire.  That happened to fall on the king's birthday, so I don't know if that played into it or not. We appreciated the time to relax at the beautiful pool at our hotel, however. One thing that I would suggest to the travel agency is regarding the cooking class that we attended in Chang Mai. It was wonderful, but some warning about transportation would have been helpful.  Trucks from the class came to pick us up from the hotel followed by stops at 2 more hotels around the city before going to the cooking school.  With the traffic, we ended up spending over an hour in the back of a hot truck to get there (45 minutes after the 3 hour class to get back). The driver didn't speak English to explain the plan, so by the time we got to the class, we were a little crabby.  Had we been prepared for that, we would have been perfectly happy taking that in, and we would have brought water bottles for the trip.