Background: The theme this extended trip was to go visit my honeyko in PI. To hedge my bets I booked 5 days in Pattaya at the beginning of the trip and 5 days in Batam at the tail-end of the trip, following by a final night in bkk prior to returning to the states. That left around 2.5 weeks in PI, namely in a place many of u know as AC
Travel Details.
Air: I had booked my flight on UAL while in BKK with Epi during the holidays. I got a RTT from BOS-BKK for $670 (all taxes included), which is an auto flag for moi when it comes to ticket purchase (under 700 all taxes included from BOS gets bought). I've been flying a lot on AA getting my status back to Plat and needed to refocus on my SA miles, which dwindled down due to a bos-mnl-bkk-bos business reward ticket last Sept and some intra-SEA hopping around (bkk-mnl-sin-bkk) over the last several trips. Intra-SEA flights this trip were booked via a SA business award (bkk-mnl-sin-bkk). I had to call several times this time in order to get someone to ticket a layover with the reward within the same geo. I used some misc. US Air miles I had floating around. As usual, UAL didn't comp me an upgrade, but my exit row seat was passable in terms of comfort.
Hotel: I am usually quite loyal to my hotel choices and stay at the same places every time, but this trip marked a couple new trends.
In Pattaya, I decided to book a room at Ice Inn, which is on Second Road in Pattaya. I've never stayed there as I've always stayed at Flipper House or Dynasty Inn. The one exception was a couple nights at Penthouse a few years ago. A friend that I hanged with in 2002 while in Pattaya stayed at Ice and the rooms looked quite decent for cheap cash (around 650-700baht/d). I thought I would give it a try considering Soi 7 Flipper was becoming difficult for me to navigate lately *cough*. Ice Inn was overbooked and I ended up crawling over to Dynasty at 3AM for a room, which is starting to feel like my own home away from home (room 201).
My PI leg was going to be all AC this time, and I booked the room at Royal Amsterdam once again. During my previous trip (1 month prior) I stayed at RA and was quite impressed with the room, breakfast food quality, and overall service, so I rebooked. This is not a slight against Orchid, which was my mainstay, BUT a BIG deciding factor for me was that RA actually had spring mattresses and not that foam BS. I'm still a big fan of Orchid and after a few weeks at RA, there are some pros and cons to each, which are fairly obvious. I'll go into those later!
(Message edited by donmarco on May 02, 2005)