Everyone knows that flying from the United States to Southeast Asia is not cheap especially when you are flying during the summer season. Even hotels have inflated prices in most places due to the summer traffic. Can you say flying in peak season?!?!? We sure can!!! But lets look at flying and accommodations once we get to Southeast Asia. First of all we will be traveling to Thailand and Cambodia during their off peak season which means we will experience a little more heat and a little more rain. However we will also be greeted with less fellow travelers and off season rates. We will be taking no less than 5 flights inside the countries of Thailand and Cambodia. Our average cost per flight is $58.80 per person. Two of our flights are under $30 and only one of our flights is above $100. This really helped to keep the cost down for travel between cities and will give us a better opportunity to see more of these two countries during our two week stay. There are much cheaper ways of getting around but for the most part buses and trains were out for us due to the time limit of only being able to stay for two weeks. Of course at these prices these airlines are no frills. To get these cheap prices all the airlines only allow you one carry on bag and it has to weigh less than 15 lbs! At first 15 lbs sounds like plenty until you remember that the 15 lbs includes the weight of your carry on bag. When we first read this Lyn and I took our suitcases up to the Fresh Market to weigh them on their scales. Both of our bags weighed in at over 8 lbs each! Now we would be down to a mere 7 lbs left for all of the stuff that we planned on taking. For Lyn and I that would mean traveling for a month with only 7 lbs of personal items. Now if you are like us you are thinking OK this is tight but I still have a personal bag. Well at least two of the carriers we are flying require that the 15 lbs not be exceeded by the two items together. Yikes! OK now you have our attention!! If you check your luggage in most cases we would be charged almost as much as our ticket price for the extra piece of luggage. We are currently researching new lighter bags and how to pack ultra light. While it will be a challenge I am really looking forward to the simplicity of keeping up with less. We will post about it later if and when we figure it out. Feel free to post any of your travel hacks in the comment section.

Once we had the flights fixed it was time to look at lodging. We decided that we wanted nice inexpensive rooms at each of our locations. We ended up with seven different rooms. Two nights were free due to credit card points and the rest averaged $38.15 per night. There were so many awesome rooms that it became very hard to decide. Luckily we were told that Agoda was a great website to find rooms in Southeast Asia. We absolutely loved this site. It gave us easy access to thousands of rooms with complete reviews and made it very easy to make a reservation. If you are looking for a room in Southeast Asia this would be the first place I would look. We also used AirBnB but usually fell back to the Agoda website. Below is a sneak peak at some of the rooms that we will be staying in as we travel through Thailand and Cambodia. We are aware that pictures can be deceiving but are hopeful the rooms will at least be close to what is shown. We read through many reviews on all of the hotels below and of course many more. Each hotel was filled with many positive reviews but their were always at least a handful of reviews that would give us a second thought. A couple of the bad ones went something like this…. “We loved the room until a flying Cockroach the size of my fist decided to make our bed home.” or “Once the baby cobra was removed from our room we continued to enjoy our stay.” Wait did you say Cobra?!?!?! I am terrified of cobras! I mean I have a healthy respect for cobras so much so that if one is found in my room it can have the room I will not be back. I can only hope that we will be one of the ones that are just leaving a nice boring positive review. I guess only time will tell.

This room is the Double Tree in Bangkok. Our very first and last night will be here. Price: Free (Credit card points.)

This room is the Lanta Miami Resort in Koh Lanta, Thailand. Price: $40 a night.

This is the Grandmom Place in Krabi, Thailand. Price: $25 a night.

This is Pha Thai House in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Price $36 a night.

This is the Okay Boutique in Phnom Penh Cambodia. Price: $40 a night.

This is the Angkor Pearl Hotel in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Price: $20 a night.