Planning for Thailand

Our biggest trip to date with our 6 year old and I wanted to do it "right" - when I say right, I just mean I wanted to plan everything to make sure we got the best trip we possibly could without having to plan anything whilst we were away and because we hadn't done a trip like this before with Jax we wanted to make sure we had a plan in place and always knew where our heads would be laying.

We got engaged in Marrakech in 2022 and had already decided before then to travel Thailand so we thought why not just get married there so that is what we did. Everything for Thailand was planned around where we decide to get married and we changed our minds several times so ultimately our plans changed too. We knew we wanted to get married earlier on in the trip so planning a route around location was imperative to making it work.

We sat down and scrolled through Instagram looking at reels and # and making a note of all the places we loved the look of, we could then concentrate on each place and write a longer list of other things there are to do there, how to get there, how long it takes and possible ideas on where to stay.

We originally wanted to get married on a beach in Koh Yao Yai but when we really looked into it, it just wasn't for us and I couldn't make it work with the places we knew we waned to go so we did some more research.

I did a lot of research into flights, trying to get the CHEAPEST flight possible so I kept a spreadsheet on flight carriers, prices, airlines, flight times and I did this for a month trying to see how cheap I could get them. The flights were just going up and up and they got to around almost £3000 with Emirates for the 3 of us return which was far too much, so we almost weren't going until one day a new carrier popped up and flights were showing around £1000 cheaper with Gulf Air, I adjusted the dates slightly to see if we could get it any cheaper and I found by adjusting the dates longer by a few days either side we could go for 5 weeks for just under £1900 for all 3 of us return which was incredible, checking those flights each day really paid off for us. We booked our flights via booking.com through Skyscanner.

Just before take off from LHR to Bahrain

Once our flights were booked we could really start planning, we were flying into Bangkok so we knew we would want a few days there to explore as we love bustling cities like this we wanted to make the most of it so proper planing was key for us as we didn't want to waste any time. We started looking at other locations to get married and I found an elephant sanctuary called Chai Lai Orchid in Chiang Mai and as soon as I saw it, I knew this is where we would be married. So we reached out and we got a potential date in of the 15th December 2023, we knew with this date we had some time before to explore Bangkok and a little snippet of Chiang Ria too.

I kept an itinerary of our whole trip on a spreadsheet and updated it with flight times, accommodation location, price, if we paid or not, if deposits were paid, dates, times, websites, tips I had found online about certain places etc - it was vast but it meant less stress later on

Snippet of one of our spreadsheets

With the first part of the trip on the books, we looked at other places and we finally came up with this itinerary for our 5 week trip.

Bangkok 4N - 3 full days

Chiang Rai 2N - 1 full days

Chiang Mai 5N - 3 full days

Khao Sok 2N - 1 full day

Khao Lak 3N - 2 full days

Koh Samui 5N - 4 full days - Christmas

Koh Tao 3N - 2 full days - New Year

Ao Nang 4N - 3 full days

Phi Phi 3N - 2 full days

Koh Lanta 3N - 2 full days

Bangkok 2N - 1 full day

To some this might look rushed, but it really wasn't as we may have gotten to a place in the late morning and had the rest of the day there + the following day too so we planned our trip like that, getting the maximum amount of time in each place and selecting the best possible internal flights we could get. As we were away over Christmas and New Year we wanted to slow down a little and have longer so we chose Koh Samui and Koh Tao for that and honestly, it was perfect.

As the months went on we tweaked things slightly but ultimately we knew what we wanted to do pretty early on, there is so much information out there, especially on instagram and that really helped us focus on how much money we would need to save in order to fully embrace this trip and do absolutely everything we wanted to do. We also managed to get all our hotels booked so we knew exactly where we would be staying so I didn't have to look into any of this whilst we were away.

If you have read this far and would like any advice on your up coming trip to Thailand please just drop us a comment below as we would love to help you plan your trip.