Budget Accommodation / Hotels in Pattaya

One thing I love about Pattaya and Thailand in general is the availability of cheap hotels for the budget traveller. They are nothing like the budget hotels in US for example which are pretty crappy to say the least. You can find a very decent and clean room for around 20-25 USD per day in Pattaya.

Something I used to do in my early days of travel to Thailand were to book hotels online (www.asiatravel.com or www.asiarooms.com) before I arrive, the rates are certainly cheaper than the walk in rates and you can get an idea about the hotel by reading the reviews of fellow travellers.

This is all good if your budget is over 30 USD per day as most hotels available for online booking are above that rate. In Pattaya there are tons of hotels that are around 18 - 25 USD (600 - 850 bhats) per day if you know where to look. I found several good hotels in this range between the second road (Sai Song) and the third road (Sai Sam).

I'm currently staying at the Intown Holiday Hotel which is in Soi 11 off second road for 700 bhats (USD 21) per day. The rooms are large and clean with AC, Cable TV etc... and there is a swimming pool on the top floor too.

I'll definitely stay in this hotel or one of the other smaller hotels around here whenever I come to Pattaya. I don't see any point in shelling out additional money for budget hotels in the beach road for example as second road is as convenient a location as the beach road.

In summary just rent a motorbike for the day when you get to Pattaya and spend few hours looking at smaller hotels in Sois (streets) between second road and third road, also you can ask the hotel staff to show you the rooms and they will accommodate you in most places. If you like the room you can take it or else just walk off.

Note: The above prices are based on rates in January - February months in 2008.

Internet access in Pattaya - WiFi and GPRS

I'm on holiday in Thailand which has become an annual thing for me and thought I'll make a few posts while I'm at it to revive this blog. I spend most of my holiday in Pattaya since I know the city well and all the night life is concentrated into the beach road, second road and the Jomtian road.

This time around I brought my laptop in the hope of getting some work done and it was important that I had WiFi access. Arriving in Pattaya I stayed at a hotel off Road 3 (Sai Sam) and had a good Wifi signal to a hotspot called info-pattaya. They had several packages ranging from 3 hours of access to 1 month. The bandwidth was based on the package and it varied from 512 kbps to 2048 kbps download. A weeks access was around 14 USD with a download speed of 1024 kbps which was pretty cheap. I was able to pay with my credit card on the http://www.hotspotsystem.com site. They aslso accept paypal I believe.

Sadly I had to change hotels and I moved to a hotel about 200 meters away near Road 2 (Sai Song). In the new hotel I could not get a good signal to any hotspot even though there were 5 or 6 in range. So I used my backup plan which was GPRS access over a DTAC sim card. They offer unlimited GPRS access for 40 bhat (1.3 USD) a day. Remember you have to call the DTAC center and request the unlimited GPRS package else they will charge you by the kilobyte which can be a bit expensive if you do a lot of browsing.

GPRS speeds are ok for email and web browsing (around 50 - 124 kbps I believe) but not recommended for hardcore work like what I wanted to do (Connecting to remote database servers etc...) . I haven't done anywork in the 8 days I have been here so far and I don't think I will do any in the next week either :).

So if you are in Pattaya you might get lucky with having access to a free or cheap WiFi hotspot from your room as there are so many around or if you move around a lot and just needs access to emails and internet browsing, spend a few hundred bhats on a prepaid SIM card and get the unlimited GPRS package activated from the shop you buy the sim card.

Another tip if you are planning to use WiFi is to request for a room in a higher floor.