Thailand's Bangkok Area Advice Guide

Bangkok is perhaps best described as a traveler’s eating, site-seeing, entertainment and shopping paradise. Certainly the best and often most authentic food in Thailand can be found here, plus superb shopping at probably the lowest prices anywhere; from markets to department stores to shopping plazas, the options are endless.

It does not matter too much where in Bangkok you stay if you choose carefully and select a hotel with immediate Skytrain / MRTA underground and perhaps river taxi pier access, unless you wish to avoid certain things or categories. For example, the area around Khao San Road is pretty much a backpacker area, albeit a very interesting one with superb market, plus there are sex trade areas of Bangkok which means the hotels near to them get more then their fair share of men (and women) bringing back a bar girl, boy or even transvestite for the night. If you want to avoid as much chance as possible of bumping into these people, it is probably advisable to steer clear of hotels near Patpong (especially), Nana Plaza and Soi Cowboy.

The best free online Bangkok map is from Thai Airways here: Bangkok Map. The BTS Skytrain route map also shows the MRTA underground system and river piers (for the river boat taxis – make sure you know which way you want to go along the river!): BTS Route Map.

Bangkok is often very hot, congested and smoggy; traffic policemen are known to die young from smog inhalation. This is why walking any distance or even using a taxi, even the air conditioned metered cabs that do clean their air vents to help prevent passengers catching bronchial related diseases, is not perhaps a good idea if you can avoid it.

Top shopping spots are MBK (Mah Boon Krong), Chatuchak Weekend Market, Siam Square, Central Chit Lom Department Store and China Town; although there are many, many more shopping plazas, markets and areas. Top sight seeing spots are The Grand Palace, Wat Pho (Reclining Buddha) and Wat Phra Kaeo (Emerald Buddha); again, there are plenty more such as the Damnoen Saduak Floating Market (actually 110 km outside Bangkok). Be warned, the top tourist destinations attract bounty hunters. Tour guides will often stop you asking where you are going and then tell you that place is closed to foreigners right now, but they can take you somewhere else and then bring you back when it opens again. Plus it is best to get a taxi driver to go to the floating market or you will stop at every tourist shop en route and arrive the same time as everyone else.

Many people coming to Thailand for a cultural, rather than a beach holiday often break up their time between Bangkok and other authentic Thai areas such as Ayutthaya, Phitsanuloke and Sukhothai, which are all easily reached by air (Phitsanuloke by Thai Airways, Sukhothai by Bangkok Airways) or rail / road (Ayutthaya). If you want a split city / beach break, Bangkok has direct air connections to Koh Samui, Phuket and Krabi.

Please do not travel to Bangkok as a sex tourist; it is an illegal, very dangerous and ultimately abusing act any human being will surely come to regret in the fullness of time.

We donate all of our direct reservation earnings from the hotels and villas on our site in Thailand to a charity in the most deprived area of Bangkok, Klongtoey, which helps keep poor even homeless children off the streets and out of child labour and the sex industry. When you book with and then stay and pay a hotel directly via our site you are basically making a donation to a very worthy cause at the same time, thank you (see our charity page).

If you would like to correct anything you believe is wrong or out-of-date here or provide extra text that could help others get the best out of Bangkok, please feel free to contact us. If you would like more tourism information on any aspect of travel to / holidays in Bangkok, please visit our associated Thailand Travel Forum.

If you have a favorite hotel in Bangkok which does not have a direct reservations facility with us, please feel free to either contact us with a name and email address for that hotel or ask them to visit our site and register. The more hotels in Bangkok that join Travel Ethos, the more we can help needy children in Thailand.