Thailand Food Tours & Vacations

Excellent tour package and itinerary for a month long Southeast Asia trip visiting Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand.

Our travel agent did a super job to ensure that we had an amazing travel adventure.

Transportation arrangements for pick-up and tours were efficient and well organized.  

Drivers were courteous and safe and vehicles were well maintained.

With the exception of one, all tour guides were knowledgeable, friendly, and beyond helpful.  

Special commendations to the following:  Our guides in Siem Reap, Cambodia, Saigon, Hoi An, Hanoi, Bangkok and in Chiang Mai.

Restaurants for lunch and food selections were exceptional.

Our vacation ended with a blissful few days of R&R at the resort on Koh Samui.

Overall experience .....5 Stars, Excellent!  Highly Recommended!

We had an amazing trip to the travel company, truly a life-changing experience!  We visited Hanoi, Halong Bay, Hoi An in Vietnam, then traveled to Siem Reap, Cambodia, and ended our journey in Bangkok and Chaing Mai, Thailand.  The travel company assigned us to very friendly, informative and knowledgeable guides in each city.  Our excursions led us through the streets of Hanoi, sampling street foods and beverages, visiting floating fishing villages and the sheer serenity and beauty on Halong Bay, experiencing the Vietnamese countryside on the back of a scooter, sunrise tour of Angkor Wat, and other temples in Cambodia, Thai massage and temple tours in Bangkok, and hands-on cooking class in Chaing Mai.  But our favorite adventure was caring for the elephants at a sanctuary in the mountains outside of Chaing Mai.  

I cannot properly articulate how special and easy this trip was for us.  Every transition to each country was smooth and relaxed.  Our guides were always there to help us navigate the new cultures, tastes and experiences.  The hotels the travel company booked were comfortable, luxurious and classy.  

Working with the travel company was a joy!  Our travel specialist adjusted our itinerary to match our interests and pace.  While planning our trip, if we had questions or wanted to adjust the itinerary, our specialist returned our emails within 24 hours, and would tweak our itinerary until we were satisfied.  I highly recommend the travel company!  

Overall, the service provided by this travel company was exceptional.  During the planning phase, our sales contact was very responsive to shaping the itinerary, accommodations, and other details to meet our requests. We received travel documents (e.g., visa letter) and an updated itinerary (mostly filling in tour guide names that were pending) before departing the USA.  A few details were pending, such as travel guide contact in Bangkok (at the end of trip), but this was provided via email during the trip.  This company hires freelancer guides in each destination (as is fairly standard across all travel agencies).  We had five different guides and drivers throughout this trip and all were excellent. We felt from the very moment we arrived in Hanoi that we were in capable hands and enjoyed our time spent touring and learning about each of our destinations from our guides. Indeed, they felt like friends more than just guides by the end!  As an example of the guides' dedication to providing excellent service, we had to modify our plan to visit Halong Bay due to a typhoon that made it impossible to take the boat excursion out into the bay.  Anticipating this possibility, our guide in Hanoi suggested an alternative destination called Ninh Binh, known as the "Halong Bay on Land."  We were so terribly disappointed about missing Halong Bay, but this alternative ended up being spectacular -- gorgeous scenery!  Although not Halong Bay, we really loved seeing Ninh Binh.  Our guide knew that many travelers would divert to Ninh Binh due to the storms, and he made sure we had hotel arrangements and also planned short biking excursion to see a pagoda in that area among other sites.  The drivers were friendly and great at navigating sometimes crowded urban centers as well as more rural, rustic roads.  We felt completely safe the entire time.  The accommodations were truly superior.  We requested booking in 4-star hotels mainly, but selected on our own two 5-star hotels to include in our itinerary, which our travel company was able to accommodate.  Of the hotels arranged by this company, my favorites were the hotels in Hue and Hoi An -- felt like 5 star, for sure!   Of course eating well is a major focus in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand.  We had breakfast included with our lodging, which ended up being spectacular buffets with a broad variety of asian and western dishes.  Many lunches and a couple of dinners were arranged at local restaurants - some more westernized than others, but we were really pleased with almost every arranged meal.  A couple of exceptions was the dinner show in Cambodia (show as good, food was just ok), and a buffet lunch in Bangkok (horrible!).  There was one miscommunication regarding our pick-up in Bangkok, our last destination on this trip.  Our travel company had changed our flight from Siem Reap, Cambodia to Bangkok, to a later flight to better accommodate our itinerary in Siem Reap. The tour guide and hotel in Bangkok had not received this updated information, even though it had been changed several weeks before our departure.  We arrived in Bangkok, and were not met by our guide.  I called her and she explained that she did not know about our earlier flight and had been waiting for us for 3 hours at the hotel (thinking we had gone straight to the hotel).  Our hotel had a representative at the airport and we were able to arrange a car to the hotel, but had to pay for it. This cost was refunded to us the next day due to the miscommunication. One other comment regarding service in Bangkok.  There was less attention to detail in Bangkok in general than in the other places we visited.  For instance, in every location our guides provided water and arranged more authentic eating experiences.  In Bangkok, we had to purchase water mostly, and the arranged buffet lunch was terrible -- not acceptable for an eating destination like Bangkok!  In other areas, however, our guide went out of her way.  Helping us arrange a cabaret show and guiding us through one of the night markets.  Overall, we felt this trip was an incredible value given the exceptional service, quality of guides, transportation, and accommodations.

Simply the best travel experience I have ever had! When preparing for my SE Asia venture, I spent a significant amount of time researching each of the destinations I was visiting prior to booking my trip. I knew exactly where I wanted to stay, places I wanted to visit, and activities which I wanted to partake in. I think this was probably the best thing that I could have done in order to maximize my trip, and still allow for plenty of down time. Zicasso and this Southeast Asia tour operator were both amazing to work with, were able to take each of my "wants" and create a beautiful, adventure packed, yet still relaxing and self discovering month long voyage. Each of the individuals whom I worked with (from the planning phase through the execution phase) were exceptional. I was always pleased by the warm & welcoming tour guides, comfortable means of transportation, and fabulous boutique hotels. I am incredibly pleased with the overall work, and service which went into creating such an amazing experience. My only constructive comment, is that I was disappointed in the quality of included lunches while visiting in Bangkok specifically. I chose to embark on a bespoke, solo tour because I am a traveler who enjoys truly experiencing each culture/country I visit, and wish to avoid westernized/tourist laden restaurants. Each of the restaurants which I went to were buffet style, westernized versions of local fare. Personally I would have preferred to go to a local restaurant and given the opportunity to order the meal of my choice (even if for extra $), just as I did when visiting included restaurants in Chiang Mai and Siem Reap. Additionally, there was one more item of constructive feedback: Having greater than 1 week to enjoy Phuket, we built my itinerary to spend the first half of my time in Patong (to have fun) & the second half in Kata (to relax). When leaving my hotel in Patong, I had to wait several hours (past the agreed uoon time on the itinerary) for transportation (sitting in the hotel lobby, as I had already checked out) to bring me to Kata Beach. The manager from the local travel company in Phuket whom was providing my transportation & services while on island was very kind and came to speak with me at my hotel in Kata that evening. However, I was disappointed that he literally just came to "meet" me. He did not offer any type of good will (ie: fruit basket, dinner voucher, discount for activities, etc). With the lunches in Bangkok aside, and the transportation mix-up/inconvenience, I was 200% satisfied with my experience!

Thankfully they got the most important things right: we were reliably met at airports by guides who could communicate with us in our language (English); we always had our lodgings with included breakfast arranged; we had guides, vehicles and drivers, and really interesting activities arranged. The trip itself, 33 days in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, was an outstanding life experience full of a wonderful and fascinating array of sights, people, food, culture.There were some issues that came up which could have been avoided if the tour operator had been more attentive, and which caused us annoyance and occasional stress. It started with our first guide, in Hanoi; they never told us they were switching us to a different guide than the one listed in our itinerary; they never gave our guide a copy of our itinerary; the guide we got was sweet enough but very inexperienced, did not adequately understand her responsibility to keep us safe, did not manage our time well, lost her phone and led us to feel we needed to take care of her instead of vice versa, deviated from our itinerary although that was really the fault of the tour operator who never gave her a copy of it (which we did when we realized the problem), and - probably due to a language skills gap - lied about whether we would get a bathroom stop in a 3-hour car ride and then tried to fix it so she made a stupid fruitless detour through Hanoi in rush hour en route to the airport to unsuccessfully look for a restroom even though she was told not to, and fail to adequately adjust to accommodate a member of our tour group with balance issues. 

Another issue was van transportation. We invariably got very comfortable vans for short trips between sites within a city, when it least mattered. But even though it was a luxury level vacation, several times we were provided with uncomfortable lower end older transit vans for longer road trips, and a couple of them didn’t have a full complement of seat belts - even after we complained and they told us it wouldn’t happen again. Also, none of the guides had microphones and my partner, who has hearing loss issues, often could not hear what they said on the vans.Our daily activity schedule proved to be unrealistic at times. Several times it was simply impossible to get to all the itinerary destinations, and even more often it was impossible to get the scheduled rest breaks in the middle of the day, and/or the daily activities ended much later at night than the itinerary schedule showed. As a result, we were often frazzled and tired, which undermined our ability to fully enjoy the trip.Some of the lodgings recommended by the tour operator, which we booked through them, were truly wonderful and memorable, but some were very disappointing and made us wonder if the tour operator had ever actually spent time checking them out in person. The resort in Ninh Binh in Vietnam was fabulous, with a terrific restaurant, but we didn’t get to enjoy it adequately because our guide didn’t get us there until almost 9 pm - when we were starving because we had again been unable to get through the itinerary schedule on time - and we had to leave right after breakfast the next morning. The hotel in Siem Reap is out of this world wonderful, with a good location, incredible decor, extraordinary service and excellent food; we were lucky to spend 4 nights there. We ended our trip at a resort on a cliff at Kata Noi beach in Phuket, where we got an upgrade to a huge comfortable suite with sunset views from its private porch. We also liked the hotel in Hue. But some of the other hotels were very disappointing, with mediocre (although always ample) breakfast food and spotty restaurant service (and due to our busy schedules we had to rely on eating in the hotels at times, as there was no time to venture further). The worst was the hotel in Chiang Mai in Thailand: location not near other restaurants and their dinner service very poor, room very dark and small; after one night, we checked ourselves out and moved to a more reliable luxury hotel at our own expense even though we had already paid for the other hotel and we understood we could not get a refund.

Most of our scheduled prepaid activities were fabulous bu there were a few glitches that could have been avoided by a more attentive tour operator. The first glitch was the water puppet show; we were promised that we could meet with puppeteers to learn more about it afterwards but this didn’t happen (nor could it because another show was scheduled to start right after ours), and the Hanoi guide didn’t know it was on the itinerary nor even that it could be arranged. This was a highlight experience much anticipated by my partner, a retired theater and TV designer/technician with experience in puppetry, and had been personally discussed beforehand on the phone with the tour operator, who had assured us it would be included. The tour guide said it was impossible and even laughed (nervously) at my partner when he insisted; he got angry at her, which was very awkward; she then called her contact with the tour operator company and they got us tickets to another water puppet show, with a backstage interview with puppeteers afterwards, the next night. In the end, we thoroughly enjoyed seeing two different water puppet companies and the backstage interview, but the whole snafu was extremely awkward with the tour guide caught in the middle - and also meant our scheduled Hanoi street food tour the second night had to be abbreviated to a stop in a crowded restaurant for a $3-4 bowl of pho after the second show.We totally enjoyed the many performance opportunities we had in our schedule: two fantastic circuses (in Saigon and Siem Reap), a couple of traditional dance performances with dinners, etc. The Royal Lunch in Hue was really a sort of theatrical experience, with artistically presented food that was also top quality. 

A highlight for us was the 2-day boat cruise on the Mekong River from Luang Prabang to the Thai border. I enjoyed the beautiful hotel on the hill in Pak Beng, but the tour operators should have warned us that it was on a steep mountain with many stairs and could present accessibility issues - which it did for my travel companions, one of whom fell and was pretty badly bruised with a loosened tooth. 

The trip was a dream.  It honestly ranks up there with my top 2 or 3 most cherished travel experiences.  For my energy level and interests, the itinerary and selection of excursions were really perfect.  I loved the beautiful, historic grittiness of Hanoi, the contrasting low key charm of Hoi An, the unexpected excitement of Siem Reap, the northern culture and fascinating temples of Chiang Mai, the beachy feel of Phuket and the metropolitan cultural intensity of Bangkok.  Hanoi, Chiang Mai and Siem Reap were my favorite cities.  The food everywhere was delicious and cheap.  The hotel breakfasts were consistently sumptuous.  Most of the guides were exceptional.  Particularly outstanding were my guide in Siem Reap and the guide in Bangkok (not sure how to spell her name, but she was a class act!)!  

My impression of the hotels ranged from really nice, centrally located with well appointed rooms to all-around extraordinary!!  

I was beyond impressed with my agent.  She was super responsive and accommodating.  I had a flight issue in Bangkok and sent out a mass e-mail due to concerns about missing a highly anticipated excursion.  My agent was among the first to reply even though she was in a drastically different time zone!  I am her big fan!  The sister company in SE Asia was fairly good.  First of all, I was not aware that they would be so involved, but this was a welcome surprise.  I was greeted with updated dossiers in each city, friendly drivers, a bottle of water and a phone call from a local rep to check in on my satisfaction.  The guides were a little variable, but overall, were quite good.  Particularly outstanding were the guide in Siem Reap and the guide in Bangkok!