Lessons Learned/Random Notes…
10 vs. 14-day quarantine is completely dependent on your arrival date. If you arrive Mar 31 or before you do 14. If you arrive Apr 1 or after, you do 10.
To count as a day, you have to physically be in Thailand from midnight to midnight. Therefore, the day you land and the day you check-out don’t count towards the quarantine day count. 14-day quarantine is really 15 nights/16 days and 10-day quarantine is really 11 nights/12 days. This was extremely confusing to me and different than how HK counts days.
The main flight from HK to BKK right now is Emirates. It arrives at 11:30 pm. It took a lot of digging, but finally I was able to confirm that even though I'm only there for 30 minutes, that day does count towards the 16. If coming from HK, keep this in mind. My fear is the flight gets delayed. Since there is no clarity on anything else in the process, they'll probably make me stay another day in quarantine.
I’m going on under the tourist Visa exemption. That normally allows 30 days, but they are extending it so that the quarantine doesn’t count against your time. While that is good, I was told they are not doing the 30-day extensions that you can normally get in Thailand that they used to routinely do (as I was told – I’ve never been, so don’t have firsthand knowledge).
To the best of my knowledge, you can only book directly through the hotel or they have set up Agoda. However, Agoda only has 10-20% of the hotels, so you’re limiting yourself if you use that.
Now is the wrong time to book an ASQ hotel – give it a couple weeks if you can.
1. Some hotels still haven’t updated their promotions from 14 to 10 days, making research hard and very time consuming.
2. Sites like Agoda have not updated their logic and won’t accept the shorter reservations
3. Prices have jumped since quarantine was reduced. When I started, many hotels were heavily discounting their original prices because nobody was coming. I think they believe the 10-day quarantine is going to increase business, so they have jacked up rates. For example, I had negotiated a 40% discount on a 14-day quarantine. When the 10-day quarantine was announced, they told me they wouldn’t discount and wanted to charge me more for 10 days than they were going to 14. They wouldn’t budge at all. I suspect in a few weeks they’ll be discounting again, even if not as heavily
With the exception of a handful of the most expensive hotels that must be in high demand, most hotels were discounting or open to offers.
Few of the hotels are chains, so researching is tough. There are ASQ reviews out there, but also a lot of junk. For example, people giving bad reviews because it was their birthday during quarantine and the hotel didn’t give them a cake (wtf if wrong with people). Most non-quarantine reviews aren’t super helpful since you care about different things in quarantine then you normally would. Area of the city, number of restaurants within walking distance, nearby attractions, etc. don’t matter. Tripadvisor has some ASQ reviews for certain properties, but many don’t have any. Especially helpful is a small number of Youtube videos guests have put up (but those are few and far between).
Hotels with balconies are in high demand – if you want one, you probably want to start looking earlier. In unit Washer/Dryer seems to be the next highest in demand item.
You are able schedule 45 minutes per day (after day 5, I think) at the hotel’s recreation area (pool or similar). You can’t actually use the pool, just walk around and get some fresh air. For that reason, hotels with nice recreation areas are in higher demand, while boutique hotels that may have no area are not in as high of demand.
Make sure to request rooms away from highways and construction – easy to forget and especially important when you’re bottled up.
Location doesn’t really matter, so don’t pay jacked up rates for something that doesn’t matter too much. Unless the view out the window is great (and that’s important to you), you may overpay for location.
Only a few hotels have quarantine and non-quaratine rooms, so you’ll need to plan to move to a different hotel/condo/AirBnb, etc.
COVID test – I’m still figuring this out, but cheapest option is public hospitals. They charge 180 HKD, but do a nasal swap test. You can go to private clinics, but they are much more. The cheapest private option I could find was 620, but they went all they way up to 2000. Prenetics seemed the best option - they charge 499 and do it all by mail. Prenetics also started doing at the airport the day of your flight. You need to schedule in advance and must be done no later than 4 hours before departure. The airport option sounds great, but adds more risk than I want. Price for that is still 499.
If you need help from the Thai Embassy, you can call them but the amount of help you get is heavily dependent on the person. I called one day and the individual just repeated over and over to look at their website. Drop off and try back later. I called the next day and got the most helpful person I’ve talked to in a while.
[ Last edited by jk45_89 at 29-3-2021 20:51 ] | |
