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I have been reflecting on my “lessons learned” while booking our first trip as we are preparing for a return to Burma.
Planning a trip to Burma isn’t like planning for a trip to any place else. All of the conveniences that I have come to rely on to book international travel – buying plane tickets online, reserving and paying for hotels online, etc are not possible in Burma. It reminds me in some ways of some of my first international trips when I had to go to the bank and purchase a foreign bank draft to mail to a hotel to hold a room. ATMs were not yet readily available, and we had to take cash and travelers checks to exchange for local currency. We paid for everything we could – hotels, meals, on credit cards.
When I was planning my first trip to Burma, I went about it in my usual way. I bought a guidebook (only the Lonely Planet has a relatively current guidebook) and read everything else I could find on Burma. I decided on a realistic itinerary for my first trip. I decided on hotels, knew what fights I needed, then tried to figure out how to book them.
I scoured the internet for ways to book the hotels I wanted. Since one cannot use credit cards in Burma – though some hotels will accept credit cards with a premium of 5%-20% – my goal was to book as many hotels as I could visa the web, paying in advance via credit card. Just one of the three hotels I wanted could be booked through a booking site in Thailand and I could pay in advance via credit card. The others I could book via the web or via email, but could not prepay, despite my best efforts. So I would have to carry in the cash to pay for them.
Flights were worse. There was no way to book them on the web… indeed, there was no way to get accurate flight times at that time (2009). I contacted a travel agent in Bangkok I have used in the past for intra-Asia tickets, but even Eddie could not get me intra-Burma tickets. A friend gave me another travel agent contact in Thailand – no luck there either.
Finally, I took the advice of some fellow travelers and contacted a travel agency on Yangon. Amazing! They could tell me the flight times, the prices, and book my flights for me. I was surprised to find that there were few choices in terms of flights times, and few flights were non-stop. Airlines run circular flights, so you almost always have a stop somewhere between where you got on and where you want to get off. I would carry the cash to pay for my flights to Burma and pay the agent on arrival. I discovered that the agency could make reservations for Balloons Over Bagan for me and give me a discount. By that time, I was beginning to understand that unlike other places in the world, travel agents in Burma could get hotel rooms for less than you could get them even through discount booking sites.
We had a marvelous trip to Burma. You can read my full trip report here:
