Sunday 7 April 2013

Villa Rental in Khao Lak

It is becoming more and more popular to rent a private villa in Thailand. Villa rentals have numerous advantages not least of which is that they often offer much better value for money than hotel rooms. If you divide the cost of a villa between 4 or more people you discover that you can save 50% on equivalent hotel accommodation.

The best place to search for villas to rent in Thailand is the internet. You can find sites for individual villas as well as lists of villas for rent on larger sites such as Flipkey and Airbnb.com. The larger sites allow you to compare prices and send off several enquiries quickly.

Surprisingly, Flipkey has only one Khao Lak villa listed. It is a 4 bedroom villa just 400 meters from the beach. Prices start at 5,700 Thai Baht a night. Between 4 people it is just over 1,000 Thai Baht each. For that money you get a swimming pool, kitchen, TV etc. and a lot more space and privacy then any hotel can provide. It is a great deal.

Moreover, since you are dealing with villa owners you can often negotiate discounts, arrange extra services and customize your holiday experience in a way that most hotel booking systems cannot.

Not all the listing sites are the same, however. Some like Airbnb.com charge a 5% to 12% additional fee to supposedly ‘administer’ the site. That should read ‘monetize’. These sites do not allow email addresses or telephone numbers to be exchanged as they want to monitor all conversations to make sure they get their cut. It is worth finding villas on Airbnb.com and then searching again for contact information; by doing so you will save yourself at least 5% off the total rental fee.

In places like Koh Phangan villa rental is becoming firmly established. More and more people are opting out of a hotel system as the prices are becoming prohibitively high. Also villa rental allows a different type of holiday experience often more suitable for families; an experience with more room, more amenities and more privacy.

So before you book a room in Khao Lak check out that you can’t get a better deal with villa rental instead.

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