Thailand is the easiest long-haul country in the world for Indian travellers right now. The 60-day visa-free window — extended from the previous on-arrival limit in 2024 — means you fill in a digital arrival card online before you fly and the rest is the trip. The food will not disappoint a single person in the group, including the strict vegetarians who’ve been braced for disappointment since Heathrow. The hotels are among the best in Asia. The flight from Delhi is under five hours. It is, in the most straightforward sense, the answer to “where should we go this December” when the family is large and the opinions are varied.
The mistake most Thailand itineraries make is skipping Bangkok or treating it as a transit. Bangkok is not a transit. It is a serious city with some of the best hotels in the world, a food scene that has more Michelin stars than most European capitals, temples that reward an early morning the way few things do, and a river that changes colour by the hour. Three nights is the minimum and four is better. The island comes after, and the island choice is the one that actually requires thought: Phuket for the serious resort and the Andaman west coast drama; Samui for reliability, family infrastructure, and the north-coast luxury properties; Krabi and Railay for the limestone karst and the traveller who wants scenery over scene. The rule we always apply — stay near the Skytrain in Bangkok, or surrender your days to traffic — sounds obvious and is ignored constantly.
We route Thailand constantly and the details we’ve accumulated are the kind that only come from doing it. That the Mandarin Oriental Bangkok is the hotel it is because of the staff tenure, not the renovation. That Amanpuri in Phuket requires you to understand it’s a sanctuary, not a beach resort — the beach is a fifteen-minute buggy ride and that’s intentional. That the September window, technically shoulder season, now has better rates than December with nearly identical weather on the Andaman coast. The TDAC took five minutes to fill in and is the easiest compliance step in international travel; we build it into the pre-departure briefing so it never becomes a last-minute scramble at the airport.
