PeterRS

As I understand it the problem in Bangkok really started when overseas "experts" were brought in in the 1950s and who recommended converting most klongs into wide roads. Big mistake! Now the city is prone to annual flooding from two sources - the annual high tides in the Gulf of Thailand sending water up the Chao Phraya and the drainage of floodwaters from upcountry down the Chao Phraya. The problem is that these two events occur at the same time. The 2011 floods started a long way (100 miles?) upstream of the city and then swept south. Nothing could stop them. A Netherlands like dyke system around the city would be ideal. But who would pay the billions of $$ required?

Does this indicate you tip the boys in advance?

I do not know any airline that sends charters to Thailand or any other country and then parks them. Their objective is a quick turnaround for aircraft, pilots and cabin crew and then get back to home base asap. The exception will be some carriers on longer hauls - both chartered and scheduled - who do not carry two crews and do now have a crew based in the destination city/country. They have no option. International rules mandate maximum pilot work hours. Some scheduled airlines do have an aircraft flying in late evening and then stay at the gate until an early morning departure. But in those cases they would never have their aircraft parked at a bridge gate requiring payment for all that time. That could cost well over $10,000 if not a lot more. If the airport does not require the gates overnight, I expect it will waive bridge gate parking fees rather than bother towing the aircraft to a park space. Either that or it has a substantial rebate scheme.

I am sure budget carriers are normally much happier with lower bus gate fees. On the other hand, these add to their turnaround time which is so vital to budget carriers. Some at DMK have only a 30 minute turnaround. I somehow doubt that can be achieved at bus gates. Re overnighting, my understanding is that hardly any major carriers will even consider this. They offload their passengers and the aircraft are then towed to a parking area before being towed back again an hour or so before the scheduled departure. Does this not partly bear out my view? Economy passengers are far less concerned about bus gates than business and first. But - and it is a big but - if the incoming plane is even 30 minutes late, the extra time taken to get from the bus gate can make the difference between catching a connecting flight and missing it. I am not against the concept of bus gates - just as long as I do not have to use one! As for transferring at BKK, I would never even consider it. Ill take Changi, Incheon, Hong Kong and others any time.

Great story. I once had a rich client who always stayed in top hotels. He told me his policy always was to tip the head concierge and the room boy as soon as he arrived, not at the end of his stay. He said he never once had anything other than great service! Tipping is the one reason why I dislike the USA. Paborn mentions tipping started in England. I frankly do not care where it started because it clearly crossed the Atlantic at some point and it is in the USA where it has gotten so totally out of hand. 20% to 25% to a restaurant waiter? To me that is a kind of madness. Sure I realise the tips are so high because the restaurant owners are such mean bastards they will not pay their staff a living wage. My answer to that is how come they will not pay wait staff but they seem perfectly happy to pay all the kitchen staff better wages? Same in hotels. Why am I expected to tip the room cleaners? With rare exceptions I leave my room very tidy. I hardly ever see these ladies and they probably spend no more than 5 minutes in my room. But if tipping originated in England, who brought the tipping syndrome to most other parts of the world? Unquestionably Americans! Because they are used to it at home, they exported the habit and now it is expected almost everywhere. Want to see a world without tipping? As z909 says in an earlier post, take a trip to Japan. There they not only do not tip, they are offended if you offer one. Here in Thailand there has grown this expectation in the major cities that tipping is expected. Perhaps the Vietnam War and all those GIs flooding into the country on their R&R and happy to splash the cash are to blame. As for me, in the bars in Thailand I tip roughly what I believe to be the going rate, although I never really check what that is. If I have a great time, the tip reflects that. If it is not so great, the tip is less but still good. After all the boys have to make a living and it is not their fault if I pick a dud. That is as much my fault as it is his. Some will consider this the fault of the mamasan for not telling this guy was a dud. Huh? The mamasans duty is to the bar owner first. He may seem all smarmy and helpful to me as the customer. But he knows he is unlikely to see 95% or more of the customers again. So do I expect him to be an honest broker? Nope. We also have to face facts. Tipping a gogo boy is not a tip. It is a fee for prostitution wrapped up in the fiction of a tip. So bar boys are a bit like waiters in the USA. They cannot live on what the bar pays them so the customer has to pay. It is sometimes a rather curious conundrum. Why are some posters reasonably happy to splash out a 20% tip in a Dallas restaurant but resent giving a decent tip to a bar boy? 4 people dining in a decent restaurant with a bottle of decent wine in the US is likely to result in a tip of $60-70. Funny. Isnt that about the going rate for an off? As for what others tip, I really could care less.

That is one view for sure. On the other hand, look at some of the airline and BKK review sites and you see a lot of angry passenger complaints about arriving back at BKK in the late evening. With many airbridge gates tied up for departing long haul flights, a lot of regional TG arrivals are parked at bus gates. How many times is there a delay getting buses to the aircraft> How many times is an incoming aircraft stuck on a taxiway for 30 or more minutes waiting for a scheduled airbridge gate to be freed up because the outgoing flight has been delayed? Too many. Tourists travelling in economy class whose final destination is BKK are probably not too concerned about such delays because they experience them once a year. It is the regular business travellers who make up the real income for airlines that get really pissed off. After a long haul flight, the last thing I want is bus gate during monsoon rains or a taxiway delay. I just want to get through immigration and into a taxi fast. There is another issue. What about passengers connecting at BKK to other parts of the region? The AOT keeps on claiming its aim for BKK is to be the best hub for the region. As it continues to tumble down regional airport rankings, constructing terminals with minimal airbridges seems to me like shooting itself in both feet. Being a hub means working smoothly as a hub and spoke operation like DFW, ORD, ATL etc. How many bus gates are found in those airports? Not many in my experience. Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong and Taipei seem to have just a handful each.

From a quick glance at the various designs, it appears the number of airbridge gates must have been dictated by the AOT brief. It also appears that there will a considerable number of parking bays requiring bus transport to the terminal. Compare that to Changi in Singapore. The existing 4 terminals have 117 air bridge gates for 82 million passengers. The new Terminal 5 now being constructed will cater for another 30-50 million passengers but its number of airbridges has not yet been determined. BKK is expecting 65 million passengers this year against the design capacity of 45 million but has only 51 airbridges. It already operates with an additional 69 bus gates. The Terminal 1 extension looks like it will have 30 gates. But that still leaves 39 bus gates and it assumes no additional flights. Since passenger number and flights are estimated to increase that clearly means more bus gates! Yet the AOT has announced that even with the new extension the design capacity will be 60 million. Can no one in the AOT do simple math?

As suggested earlier,, apps like Hornet severely restrict the number of profiles you can view unless you pay for the premium service. Same with Grindr. Planet Romeo gives you many more profiles and more information on each (if the member has uploaded some). I agree with the other poster above about the new version being more complicated and user unfriendly. I dislike it a lot. I found Blued popular in Bangkok and gave me hundreds of profiles all very close by. Unfortunately whatever your age you will get inundated with hits from China. But its easy to just delete these or have one reply for all. When you reply in English the app will translate it in Chinese at the other end. It also has a built in English/Thai/English translation facility.

I thought Cathay had moved to Terminal 8. This has 29 gates with an extension concourse rather like the one being built at BKK. But it shares the terminal with other OneWorld carriers. No idea if that means occasionally having to use a bus.

BKK is a pretty lousy airport if only because of the distances that have to be travelled on foot. People movers are all very well except that most people have little clue how to use them. One side should be for those happy to stand and look at the scenery. The other for people who want to move. BKK has a lot of people movers. If you arrive on an A380 or with a couple of other planes in the same Aisle, there is inevitably a scrum of people who quite happily clog the people movers so that walking becomes totally impossible. If your seat is at the back of the plane and you want to try and get nearer the front of the Immigration queue, mostly you have to forget the people movers and just plain run. The Chinese are often to blame for this, but not exclusively so. I have seen many a western couple stand on both sides of a people mover totally unaware that others may wish to pass them. So if BKK is going to depend on yet more people movers rather than some form of more automated transport to get passengers from the main Terminal to that long terminal extension, I can see a great many really frustrated passengers. God forbid they use lifts up and down as at Heathrow Terminal 5. Anyone used to Chinese ideas of queuing will be in for massive frustration. The other issue is check-in times. To get to the new extension and then along it to wherever your gate might be will add I guess at least 20 - 30 minutes. A look at the queues for some airlines check in desks and it is obvious that vast numbers of passengers still do not get boarding passes in advance. Plus the queues at some airlines bag drop counters can also be very long. Find yourself behind one couple with a couple of connecting flights and a problem with their ticket and it is as bad as normal check in. With those upstairs Security lines often clogged at rush hours and the same at the Immigration desks downstairs, I can see a lot of people being very late arriving for their flights.

I am very much behind the times - and thanks DivineMadman for clarifying the difference between the Terminal 1 extension and Terminal 2. Terminal 2 seems so small it surely is impossible to be for the country major carrier? Can you imagine all the flights departing in the morning and the late evening. There are not nearly enough gates. Besides, TG will normally be in the same terminal as other Star Alliance carriers. That is totally impossible in that little terminal. Maybe it is mainly to be for airlines with smaller aircraft like Bangkok Airways. I am still curious about passengers getting from the main terminal to the extension. I assume there will have to be at least one underground train as at most international airports.

That concept photo is virtually identical to Osaka's Kansai. So what are that video and photos posted earlier? They are nothing like the concept photo. Is there a third terminal being built?

Space between runways is always inevitably limited but I just can not agree with that analysis. Any terminal that permits aircraft parking gates only on one long side is a disaster for passengers. Looking again at the photos, it seems that there may be gates also at one end which makes a bit more sense. But suggesting there is no room between the runways for a new terminal with plane access to gates on both of its long sides is just not true. There is tons of room between the runways to fit an oblong shaped terminal with plane gates on both of the long sides. After all, terminal 1 is plenty wide enough to have to have gates on the outside and the inside of both long arms of the H. As this drawing of the existing terminal shows, 4 of the concourse areas permit plane gates on both sides - B, C E and F. The other three are only one side access. Now take the distance between the end of B to the end of F. That sits between the two runways and still has room for taxiways beyond each. So that width is definitely available further south. The problem is it would probably have to be further away from the main Terminal. Has no-one ever heard of Terminal trains like they have in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei, Hong Kong, Tokyo and goodness knows how many other airports? Better still, why not copy Osaka's Kansai airport with a Terminal plum in the middle between the rrunways. This would require two buildings but turn the buildings in the diagram through 90 degrees and there will still be plenty of room between the runways at BKK.

My first thought? What a waste of space! Not within the terminal, but access for planes. Surely the point of a terminal is to permit as many planes as possible to park at its bays. So there should be bays on as many sides as possible. Most newish oblong shaped terminals that I have seen permit planes to park on both of the long sides. DMK and LHR Terminal 5 are two exceptions, although one has aisles jutting out from one long side and the other has two two long-sided satellites. It seems to me a design like this one will inevitably mean a lot of bus gates.

He paid 3000 baht. I think unlikely you get rooms at the Dusit for that price. Could be be the Crowne Plaza I reckon. Or even the Montien which had a no joiners policy when I stayed there.

Many thanks Spoon for all that very useful information.

Try the Blued app. It requires a short selfie video for photo verification purposes before your profile photo is posted. Many thousands of of Thai guys are moving to this app because it has built in Thai/English translation.

What you say is very reassuring. But there have been quite a lot of reports about open hostility to young gay men and women resulting in death in a lease one case last year. We have also had reports here about raids on massage places and saunas. Seems even the venerable Blue Boy bar/club was raided the other evening for the first time in its long history. One report mentions this being something to do with a more hardline approach to appease Muslim parties before an election - is that next year? When I lived in KL 25 years ago Blue Boy was the most popular gay meeting place in town. This time it was stated the raid was to find drugs. Isn't that always the excuse authorities use? On the other hand, one Minister has said it was to stop the spread of LGBT culture in Malay society. I wonder what happened to the 100 or so patrons who were in the bar at the time of the raid. Even though Shariah Law only applies to Muslims, the ban on homosexual activity covers everyone - or at least it used to. Not a very comforting place to visit now.

It might have helped if the British had removed many of their laws before their rush to grant independence to former colonies. It was certainly a mad rush. It had no cash any more and massive debts. But as it was getting round to considering possible changes to its own sodomy law, it was obviously quite happy to leave it in place in much of the rest of the world. We may think Muslim nations are bad when it comes to punishing gay sex. Homosexuality remains illegal in nearly 80 countries. But most of these were British colonial possessions. Some like Nigeria, Sudan and Somalia actually increased penalties after the British departed. There we can now be subject to capital punishment. I cant see any easing of the law being possible in our lifetimes.

I think you are overly optimistic dear Vinapu. Have you seen what has happened in Muslim Brunei? Shariah Law introduced for gays. So now you can be stoned to death if you decide to visit there and are accused by four people that they have seen you have sex with another man. Whether they have seen you or not is really immaterial. People can say anything for any reason these days. Fake facts? Aceh Province in Indonesia seems not to go the stoning route, but they will happily break into your bedroom. If you are having sex with another guy, you will be given a good 100 lashes in public. In the greater Muslim Indonesia, there is a fast growing anti gay movement with none other than the Defence Minister claiming homosexuality is a "threat" and akin "to a modern form of warfare." A Parliamentary Committee in Indonesia is even considering a proposal to ban all sex outside marriage. According to Deusche Welle, the PSeaker of the Indonesian parliament said legislation is needed to curb "homosexual excesses, such as murder, HIV/AIDS and paedophilic." If you think that a couple of Islamic countries making it more difficult for gay people will result in another majority Muslim country like Malaysia easing restrictions, sorry but I suspect you need to rethink your position.

Wasnt he outed on another Board and banned as a hydra? If I recall correctly his alter ego who had been posting before sglad appeared was as Sugargranpa. Strange both names prominently feature S and G. And wouldn't you know both are still members of this Board! Is there a hydra here

Ghastly idea! Sounds like a hideous hamburger eating contest.

Surely it also depends on your budget? With no limits, I would hop over to the Sukhothai hotel on Sathorn for the best and most extensive breakfast buffet you can find in the city. A little shopping or cruising and then a simple light street stall lunch. By mid afternoon you will be peckish again, so head down to the Mandarin Oriental for its splendid afternoon tea in the Authors Lounge. A light nap followed by cocktails at the Bamboo Chic Bar on the 4th floor of Le Meridien Hotel. then an excellent Thai dinner at Ruen Urai in the Thai-style house at the next door Rose Hotel. After that you will be all set for an evening of revelry in Silom Soi 4, Soi Twilight or wherever takes your fancy. That presumes you have some cash left, though

Seems a rather dramatic thread headline when the police do not suspect foul play! But then we know the BIB are now always right

I always find its best to look at other international flights arriving at around the same time. According to the airports arrival/departure page, the Qatar flight arrives at 6:55 am. Luckily there is no international flight arriving for an hour before then. The nearest is from Chengdu at 05:55. So if your flight is on time and others are not early, Immigration should be a breeze. There is an Emirates 777 arriving at 07:20 followed immediately by three short haul international flights. I reckon you will be fine unless your flight is delayed. https://www.phuketairportonline.com/flight-status-arrivals-departures/