PeterRS

I would recommend you try one of the Siam Roads Guides based in Ho Chi Minh. There are three currently listed as being based in HCM and I am sure at least one will be happy to travel down to meet you and show you around. Vietnamese friends tell me that Can Tho can be quite gay. https://siamroads.com/#Vietnam

@Keithambrose and other other poster tried that trick in other posts which the moderator promptly threw out. Seems that will be the destination of this one. Danang and the entire area from Hoi An in the south to Hue in the north is perfectly beautiful. Sadly my Vietnam friends tell me you are not going to find any beach resort in Vietnam with the sort of beach gay community like Pattaya. Besides you have the Vietnam visa issue to consider.

Does that mean that Le Continental still exists?

And @Department_Of_Agriculture clearly knows virtually nothing about Myanmar. The majority Bamars in Myanmar number roughly 68% of the population. The Rohingya population less than 2%. @12is12 is perfectly correct when he claimed that the vast majority in Myanmar did not object to the genocide in Rakhine State. That is precisely why Aung San Suu Kyi refused to criticise the army junta when she appeared before the World Court. The majority Bamar population have never liked the Rohingya in the south west of the country largely because it is a legacy of British colonialism when they imported vast numbers of Muslim Indians from Bengal, many of whom then took over jobs occupied beforehand by Burmese, always at lower wages. As for Israel, @Department_Of_Agriculture is the one being hypocritical. He drags up a post made in November 2022. Yet he fails to point out that this was made 11 months BEFORE the Hamas incursion into Israel and Israel's subsequent genocide in Gaza. Hypocrite!

https://www.thaiembassy.com/travel-to-thailand/travel-to-thailand-from-australia It's perfectly simple! And you could have just checked on the internet before posting.

Towards the end of this post, there are some good recommendations. Mango Tree has been going for decades and consitently serves fine Thai cuisine at a sort of mid-price range (much more expensive than Foodland though). Ruen Urai has been praised several times in this forum and I have eaten there at least two dozen times over the last ten years. But you have to be a bit careful. First it is a good bit more expensive than Mango Tree (at least double). Second, avoid it if they try to palm you off with a table upstairs, Absolutely dull and boring atmosphere with no windows. Downstairs is a delight, but be 100% sure of your booking. Last year several days in advance I booked for dinner with a fellow poster. It was all confirmed, as was downstairs. When we arrived, we were told we'd have to sit outside as they had booked in a party occupying the entire lower floor (which is not big). Clearly that had only been booked after I had made my booking and they had not even had the decency to call back and tell me. We walked away in disgust. I have not been back. A restaurant with their prices has to have good service, in my book! But the ridiculous comments about Burmese and Vietnamese eating habits are so vastly overexaggerated they should be completely discarded. Both countries have experienced horrific decades-long wars - in Vietnam thanks to a gruesome illegal American war and in Myanmar nearly eight decades of appalling military rule thanks in large part to on-going disasters resulting from British colonialism. In those days, finding anything to eat for much of the population was far from easy. Now, in Vietnam, the government is attempting to get rid of eating cat meat and most of the population is also against it. Assuming that 70% of MBs eat it is utter nonsense.

Bascially yes but only as far as this condo in this quiet residential part of Bangkok is concerned. There are very few westerners in this 50-unit condo. The "western" agent is more used to handling considerably more up-market properties.

I can recall for about 3 years Trivago blitzed TV channels around Asia with advertisements offering all manner of promises. As @TMax mentions they were also taken to court in this part of the world. Thankfully I cannot recall a Trivago ad appearing in the last 4 or 5 years. I have found in Asia that some hotels do not want you to book with them. Almost on the same topic, hotels booked direct sometimes do not deliver what is promised. I had a very bad experience about 20 years ago with the Hyatt in Shinjuku in Tokyo. Having stayed there before, I knew the hotel had quite a large number of end rooms that were much more suited to a small business hotel. Not listed on the hotel's website, they were less than half the size of the basic standard rooms and double beds were basically singles. So I called to book their standard room for three nghts stressing "standard". When I arrived, I was shocked to find myself in one of the tiny rooms. When I queried at the front desk and explained I had paid for the standard rooms, I just got fobbed off to the night manager who spouted some gobbledygook that I totally failed to understand. The next morning I insisted I meet with the general manager, a Mr. Fujita. Once again the discussion went round in circles - i.e. almost nowhere. But I did pick up a nugget that these rooms were offered primarily to walk in Japanese guests and those in groups - I was with two others. They then leaked that the price of these rooms was only about $5 less than the much larger standard rooms. Being somewhat stubborn, I was absolutely not prepared to let the matter rest. So I wrote to Hyatt head office in Chicago with details of my encounters. I was then very surprised to get a mail asking when someone could call me. During that call it was pointed out that head office had absolutely no idea about these tiny rooms and were appalled to hear about them. Apparently there were around 98! An executive would be in Tokyo a couple of weeks later and would make an inspection. In the meantime, I was offered three free nights at any Hyatt and a guaranteed upgrade to a suite on that next visit! The upshot was I actually was able to use those three free nights twice! A year later I had a bad experience at the somewhat ageing Hyatt in Honolulu - mostly to do with the travel desk and being sent on some wild goose chase that wasted half a day. Again I complained. The manager then reposted the three nights back to my account! I finally used them a couple of years later at the lovely Hyatt in Kyoto! So when booking with a hotel now, I want a detailed booking slip with exact details of the room and where it fits in with the hotel's other room sizes. Finally airines. Yes, I do mostly book direct. But shopping around 18 months ago in Europe, I had to make a quick return trip from Edinburgh to Zurich. Swiss and BA were in the £500 range. Checking booking agents, I found flights on my dates and preferred times on KLM with one plane change in Amsterdam for £220. Six years ago I again found via a booking site an Edinburgh/Bologna return flight on Lufthansa much cheaper than other carriers. So for me booking sites still can have their uses.

"As a gay man, I feel like a wave of anger, and violence, and resentment is heading towards us on a vast scale. I’ve literally seen a difference in the way I’m spoken to as a gay man since that November election, and that’s a few months of weaponising hate speech, and the hate speech creeps into the real world. “I’m not being alarmist. I’m 61 years old. I know gay society very, very well, and I think we’re in the greatest danger I have ever seen.” The reference to the November election may sound as though the quote comes from an American. Nope. He is British and very much an icon for British gay men. Russell T. Davies is one of the country's most prominent gay screenwriters. Think Queer As Folk about a group of friends in Manchester’s gay quarter and you know how his ground breaking tv series changed a lot of views in the UK. He had originally titled the series Queer as Fuck, but the network controllers understandably had a collective breakdown. In an article in today’s Guardian, his concern now is that, as he suggests, what happens in America always happens here. Reform UK, the party formed recently by the dreadful lying Brexiteer and one-time adviser to Trump, Nigel Farage, has been gaining voters at a rapid speed. “As we look down the barrel of a Reform government, we, the gay community, the queer community, should be revolting in terror, anger and action,” he says. And he blames Trump for much of it. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/aug/11/russell-t-davies-blames-reform-and-trump-for-decline-in-uk-gay-rights

The primary reason for this was quite simple. No one would expect a purser to be able to fly the plane, but he/she will be able to unlock the cabin door to let the second pilot in. I believe this condition has now been abandoned as pilots have been given a second emergency code for opening the cabin door - a code that has a very short life span after use so that others can not make use of it. We have discussed the German Wings tragedy in several threads. We tend to forget that was not the first or even second case of pilot suicide leading to the total loss of the aircraft and all on board. The 1999 Egyptair flight out of New York has also been mentioned. But arguably the first was in Asia. Silkair was founded in 1989 and eventually became Singapore Airline's regional carrier. In December 1997 on a routine flight from Jakarta to Singapore, the Boeing 737-300 crashed into a river in Sumatra with the 104 on board all killed. The US NTSB Report concluded the crash was a result of pilot suicide. Others blamed a rudder malfunction. In 2021 Silkair ceased operations with its routes taken over by Singapore Airines and it new low cost carrier Scoot.

Remember the movie "Catch Me If You Can" and the part where the Leonardo Di Caprio character becomes a Pan Am pilot? Now someone else has found ways to get free flights. Over six years he falsely posed as a flight attendant on various carriers to get free flights on several others. In all he racked up over 120 free flights. To obtain such flights, the applicant has to access a special airline website and then provide the name of his employer, date of hire and airline badge number. During his free flight sprees, 35-year old Tyron Alexander claimed to work for seven different airlines and had 30 different badges. In the USA, to become a flight attendant and obtain an airport security badge you have to go through a criminal background check, provide ten years of employment information, dates of hire and a fingerprint sample which is sent to the FBI. Yet even after 9/11, many American airports do not bother about the Airport Security bagdes (e.g. LAX) and rely on staff passing through the air crew security lanes having their airline badges. Alexander was convicted in a Florida Court in early June and is due to be sentenced on August 25 in Florida. https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2025/06/11/fraud-flight-attendant-free-flights/84151108007/

I am like you. I post regularly and I always try to give an accurate account of my stay. I read a lot of reviews but increasingly find many of them all but useless. My rule of thumb always used to be jettison the best 33% and the worst 33% and just stick with those in the middle. Even now I find that is much less useful. My only reason for staying with Tripadvsor is they provide you with a map of the world and cities and places where you have stayed. I am sometime staggered that, largely thanks to business, I have stayed in so many countries, towns and cities around the world. Now I am much more likely to make my own decisions rather than depending on the comments of others.

Certainly no one just making occasional if frequent visits should ever consider buying - unless they have an endless supply of cash. Equally, no one without having spent considerable time in Thailand should consider buying over renting in the first year ir two. One point made in the video is the problem that anyone who buys can face: selling! Sometimes it's easy; sometimes fiendishly difficult. Two extremes from one flat in my own condo. For a dozen years living next to me were two retired English guys. For whatever reason they had purchased a large 205 sq. m flat with three bedrooms and bathrooms. To purchase a flat that large (my own is just under 80 sq. m) was in my view idiotic, but I just assumed they could afford it. Living on meagre state pensions, they depended on a large pot of cash. With the 2008 worldwide recession and interest rates collapsing for more than a decade, they should have seen the writing on the wall. They didn't. When they finally realised they'd have to sell the flat around 2012 to raise some cash, selling took them 3 years. It was way too big for most Thais and expats generally look for much smaller accommodation. Even when they did sell, they had to drop their asking price by 28%. That meant over around 12 years they had realised a gain of only around 33%. The next owner was English with a Thai girlfriend and son. After a year they found a another apartment nearby and also decided to sell. Within weeks they had sold it for a price that was 72% greater than their purchase price. That must have made the two guys who had earlier sold livid! The reason, though, was partly quite simple. The two English guys had gone to one western estate agent. The next owner's girlfriend had registered with three Thai agencies. The couple who bought it have since only rented it out!

Respectfully I disagree. I have on I think three occasions ended up with twin beds when I have ordered and been promised one large bed. Pushing them together looks as though they make a better larger bed, but you always end up with the gap in the middle, no matter how small. As soon as you cuddle up to someone you hit that gap. If the beds are on some form a castor, you can quite easily fall down between the two. Even if you remain on the bed, I find the dip between the two more than annoying! Trying to share just one twin bed in the tiny room of a Japanese business hotel - good luck!

Not at all! In Japan I have several times been in a room where if I stretched out my arms I could touch the side walls. Much more important to me is that the room is really quiet.

"A literary psychological thriller set in Melbourne’s queer scene with the suspense of The Talented Mr Ripley and the gritty emotional landscape of Christos Tsiolkas and Bryan Washington." So goes the PR blurb for Thomas Vowles novel Our New Gods. The basis of the story line? “Ash has recently arrived in Melbourne and fallen in love with his charismatic new friend, James. After witnessing a disturbing altercation at a party, Ash suspects that James’s mysterious boyfriend is hiding a sinister side. Is he dangerous? Or is Ash’s jealousy fuelling paranoid delusions? “A compulsive novel that offers no easy answers, Our New Gods has an assuredness that reflects Thomas Vowles’s success as a screenwriter: the atmosphere is taut, the plot twists are dizzying, and the story will haunt readers long after the final page." A pre-reviewer on amazon writes, “Enthralling, dark, elegant, sexy, electrifying” Looking at various websites, it is clear that this book takes the reader into many gay haunts including the world of gay apps and saunas. It is both gritty and explosive. As stated in the site appended below, it “wades into the muck of modern desire.” Most of the above is the basis of a preview that appeared in The Guardian on June 27. The novel will be published on September 3 and available from amazon. http://www.ourdailyread.com/2025/06/our-new-gods-by-thomas-vowles-review-debut-queer-thriller-dares-to-wade-into-the-muck-of-modern-desire/ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jun/27/our-new-gods-by-thomas-vowles-review-debut-queer-thriller-dares-to-wade-into-the-muck-of-modern-desire

Totally agree with @Travelingguy's point. On the other hand, I chose Bangkok after visiting regularly (sometimes monthly) over two decades. It was a lot cheaper when I purchased my condo but I have an asset which has increased in value by around 200% and not thrown away 24 years in rent. Yes, I know that some will say by tying a wad of cash up in a condo purchase I missed other investment opportunities. Reasonable argument, I suppose, but I am no Warren Buffet and my investment decisions (sometimes made by so-called professional advisers!) have often lost money!! I think I wrote before that I did miss the boat on one investment I had considered. When I learned that Warren Buffet had taken a 10% stake and a seat on the Board in the Chinese battery and car maker BYD, I thought about buying $1,000 in shares. I didn't! Buffet paid US$230 million for his stake less than 20 years ago. By 2022 it was worth more than $8 billion!

Very useful advice. I quite often find that if I want, say, a large bed, the cheaper offer on another site will only be for a twin bed room. Not I think, what most posters here will be looking for!

I have usually done the same, athough I am wary about quite a number of guest reviews if only because we all have some differing views on our hotel requirements and experiences. Also, as one who has travelled frequently to many countries in my career, my requirements are no doubt different to someone just staying in a hotel for, say, the second or even tenth time. That's not to say my requirements are always the same. I am almost always as happy in a near tiny Japanese business hotel as in a large chain hotel accommodated by a client. Another concern about guest reviews is there is now much more pressure put on guests to complete review questionnaires than there was even ten years ago. Then I found that on checking out a small number of hotels would request I write a Tripadvisor review of my stay. Now I reckon I am asked to review stays - either by the hotel staff themselves (sometimes even going to the length of giving me a little printed request slip) or by most of the booking sites. In general, I find many of these reviews now are dependent not on a guest's total experience but on one or two things that they either liked or disliked. So someone will give a perfectly good hotel just a 2-star (out of five) rating because there was no toothbrush in the bathroom! (Yes, I have actually seen that!) Or you get rave one-line 5-star reviews which have obviously been placed by someone or business associated with the hotel. I even wrote about this to Triadvisor's head office after a dreadfully poor overall stay at Singapore's Marina Bay Sands Hotel. Within a month, most of the reviews I had queried suddenly disappeared! Business travel magazines have long touted the fake reviews often found on Tripadvisor. Booking site reviews are usually limited to this who have actually used the site to make the booking. But I do now take all of these with a very large pinch of salt. Last point about @vinapu's comment re pricing. I do tend to book quite far in advance. The concern then is that prices for the period for my stay might come down beforehand. Then I negotiate a reduction directly with the hotel. Usually it works, although now with booking sites more commonly offering cancellation up to 2 or 3 days beforehand, this is less of an issue.

Thanks, but I don't have a VPN. In any case I have used agoda at least 200 times to know how to find the full price.

I think the real question posed above is not how pleased you are with the site but how much you might have been overcharged for all your bookings. Hotels are equally angry and booking.com's practices. As I stated some hotel associations are taking out their own class actions particularly re the site's contract conditions which they believe actually increase prices overall.

I'm listening - and hear nothing!

If there is one thing on my bucket llst that will never happen it is seeing the earth from space. Jim Lovell, one of the second group of NASA astronauts, did that four times, most notably in 1970 when, as commander of Apollo 13, he not only almost died in a weightless grave, he, his two colleagues and a ground team working feverishly on near impossibilities, managed to bring his crippled spacecraft back to earth safely. It was a time when the world quite literally watched in wonder. Jim Lovell died two days ago aged 97. Although I was one of those who did follow almost every moment of Apollo 13, I was more in awe of his first Apollo flight, Apollo 8, the first manned flight to reach the moon and then fly around it at Christmas 1968. This was when one of his colleagues pointed his camera at the earth and took what has become an iconic photo. Science & Society Picture Library / Getty Images Many were against that flight, fearful of what might happen on the moon's dark side when there could be no communication with the earth. I recall that one was Sir Bernard Lovell, the British Astronomer Royal. I cannot now recall what doubts he then expressed about that mission, but others were very concerned about engine reliability. If it failed and the spacecraft could not get out of lunar orbit, Lovell's's heroics on Apollo 13 would never have happened. Presumably his body would still be circling the moon and we would have mourned his passing 55 years ago. These astronauts were true adventurers. I salute them all

I became increasingly depressed as I watched that vdo. As the OP states, there is little there that has not been included in other similar videos. At one point I wondered if everyone he spoke to in the expat community is as downbeat on Thailand as his monotone delivery! He certainly makes useful points, but in my view spends 35 minutes saying what could have been condensed into 6 or 7. His main point about knowing what you might be getting yourself into before commiting to retirement in Thailand is one that everyone must take to heart and mind. It has been stressed time and again on this Board. Thailand is not a retirement paradise unless you know quite a bit about the country and the part you wish to retire to. An understanding of how things can quickly change here is also important. The importance of an existing medical insurance policy prior to coming to Thailand and of not burning bridges and cutting oneself off from friends and family at home are other important points. And of course having enough cash to cope with emergencies which almost certainly will arise for some. On the other hand, there are many expats who have come to Thailand and remain here, most being more than reasonably happy with their choice.

The parent company of booking.com is Booking Holdings based in Delaware in the USA and listed on the NASDAQ-100 index. It is a huge travel company controlling booking.com, agoda, priceline, expedia, kayak, cheapflights and others. Its booking.com site is based in The Netherlands. A 2023 study by Hotrec and the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland Valais revealed that Booking Holdings held a 71% share of the European online hotel market. For years there have been complaints on travel sites and to newspapers about problems with this site - mostly pre-payments which are then cancelled using the "free concellation" clause - but refunds are either heavily delayed (for more than a year in several cases) or not provided (see the complaint site below). In 2016 alone there were 12,000 complaints against the site in the UK. Now, this massive company is again in the news for dubious practices which have resulted in a new class action lawsuit against the company for allegedly overcharging customers through fake discounts and artificial scarcity of rooms. According to the Consumentenbond (the Dutch Consumer Agency) customers have been overcharged for years through misleading practices. If you booked through booking.com since 2013, you might be due a refund (assuming you still have receipts or other proof). Worse, it made illegal agreements with hotels preventing them from offering cheaper prices or better conditions on their own hotels and other booking websites. Last year the European Court ruled that booking.com broke the rules. Spain then hit the company with a hefty €413 million fine. Even those who used agoda and expedia may be able to join the class action for it argues that booking.com's market dominance artificially inflated prices across the entire sector. Part of the aim of the lawsuit is to get rid of misleading practices on booking search engines. Anyone can join the the Consumentenbond class action - see link below. Within a week of announcing the class action, over 180,000 individuals joined up. There is no cost and should the claimants win, 75% of the judgement will be divided amongst them. In April this year a second class action against booking.com was commenced by more than 10,000 leading hotels in Europe. Again this claims for losses as a result of the booking.com "best price" condition making it impossible for hotels to reduce their prices below that rate. Hotels have until August 29 to join the action. Additional lawsuits are being considered by several American Law firms. Details of one and an application to join are also in another link below. Allegedly the site used fake discounts, incomplete prices and fabricated scarcity to influence consumer decisions. There are cases where bookings have been made and paid for, reminders sent by the company, arrival at the overseas hotel only to receive emails saying the booking has been cancelled. In one such case highlighted in a British TV programme in 2021, two young ladies had to pay a total over £875 on a short vacation from the UK to Portugal. When calling to complain to booking.com that there was no booking, they were connected to an operator in Japan and the call was cut off. With no funds for other hotels, they had no choice but to return home. The following month booking.com offered £187 in compensation. The girls followed this up with series of no less than nine emails threatening legal action. During this process, the girls were pushed around various departments and had twice to submit receipts. Booking.com finally came up with another £500. I understand that last year following the European Court ruling, booking.com changed it "best price" practice in contracts with hotels. Just last month, a booking.com spokesperson stated, "It is absolutely nonsense to say we artificially inflated hotel prices." Well, faced with a barrage of legal issues, they'd have to say that, wouldn't they! https://www.complaintsboard.com/bookingcom-b110669 https://www.dw.com/en/over-10000-hotels-join-complaint-against-bookingcom/a-73526132 https://www.agrusslawfirm.com/companies-with-arbitration-clauses/booking-com/ https://dutchreview.com/news/booking-com-class-action-lawsuit-claim-compensation/ Lastly, I have started using smaller search engines. I find Hong Kong's Klook site has better prices in Taipei than agoda and the same with Japanican in Tokyo. I am going to change my November Taipei booking from agoda to Klook (which I have used once before).