trip to myanmar
 

I am very interested in taking a trip to Myanmar. I am considering taking a cruise on the Orient Express ship "The Road To Mandalay" in Feb. Any feedback? Also, any suggestions as to the best airline to travel there? Any thoughts about the country?

Thoughts? Yup, start by calling it Burma and take it from there.

trip to myanmar
 

^ yup. I'd start researching what travel amenities you are accustomed to and if those amenities are available. Maybe you should try to adjust to the region by going to hang out in Bangkok first. Burma is decades behind BKK.

There are two multi-multi-page threads in Mileage Run Deals that you might want to plough through ;)

There are lots of recent Burma/Myanmar trip reports in that forum. And tons of threads here in this forum too.

It's a fascinating place. But has a ways to go for the infrastructure to handle the amount of tourists. It's not a luxury destination. But can be very rewarding if you go with the right expectations and a lot of patience.

You will adore the ship and the Orient Express company. It is not my way of travelling, I read up on where i am going, catch a plane and then worry about how it all pans out when i arrive. I have stayed numerous times at the governors House in Yangoon and have spent many a evening listening to the tales of travellers from the boats. Most are Orient Express fans and have been on all the trains etc and this hotel is where they stay when they arrive and leave. The trip to Bagan is incredible and Bagan is the most wonderful place on earth. I am pretty sure it is optional but do try the balloon flight over Bagan, it is run by a mate of mine and it is just so good. Mynarmar is a delightful country to visit, lately they are happy with any currency and with excellent rates of exchange , now is an excellent time to visit. I highly recommend Thai Airways as your airline from Bangkok, but you will find that within 6 months most of the Asian airlines will be flying in, do enjoy

I've traveled with Orient Express (train from Singapore to Bangkok). Very nice experience, luxe.

I've also traveled with Pandaw Cruises - brilliant company, amazing customer service and they return much of the profit to local projects (schools, independence projects, and during the typhoon they converted their lovely river boats to mobile medical clinics and provided amazing amounts of aid to flood victims). I highly recommend Pandaw Cruises.

I can not recommend Pandaw Cruises enough - in 60+ years of travel, including National Geographic Expeditions and Tauck, I can say Pandaw has remained a highlight, and I will travel with them again.

Lots of info about Myanmar online.

My two cents.....Great place. I really enjoyed it. I did not like Yangon, but the Schwedagon Pagoda was amazing. Otherwise my favorite was Bagan. Mandalay was alright too.

I recommend pre-booking your hotels. And make sure you have a nice stack of brand new US currency before going over. They are in the process of installing ATM machines, but I wouldn't count on them at this point in time (Jan 2013).

Go now before the mass tourism spoils the country :(

Am I doing something wrong here? I've tried e-mailing 3 different local travel agents now, requesting 2 domestic air tickets on specific dates (RGN-NYU and NYU-MDL). So far exactly 0 of them have replied. Any recommendations are appreciated. I see some advice in other threads about doing a forum search for local TAs, but I am able to find very little on the subject.

I haven't used a travel agent in years, but when we emailed hotels in Yangon for availability they were very prompt to reply. I'm talking about hours, not days.

BTW, the bus was pretty easy to Bagan and then to Mandalay. But I'm a budget traveler. :) (One word of advice, pre-book your bus. Don't just show up at the bus "station".)

I had to email a few travel agents before I finally heard back from one. And even then it took about a week to hear back from that one. Nobody else got back to me. I used onestop Myanmar. I don't know if it helped that I booked a couple of hotels with them too.

If all you're looking for are flights, you might want to try OWAY (http://www.oway.com.mm/). They didn't deliver the actual flights that I chose and paid for on their website, but they did deliver tickets for the dates in question (typically replacing nonstops with one-stop flights). Therefore you should always choose the cheapest they offer. Also I had very good luck with using hotels to obtain flight tickets.

Thanks for the feedback. I've finally received a reply on my 3rd or 4th try. Will be interesting to see if they can actually get me some tickets as well :)

Thanks for the tip! Air Mandalay has a similar "normal" booking engine, albeit only showing their own flights. Prices quoted seem similar between the two, except OWAY shows Air KBZ and Asian Wings which are slightly cheaper.

I noticed this text on the left side during the booking process at OWAY:
Does this mean you just e-mail them and they will give you a lower quote? According to a couple of threads in this forum, booking domestic Myanmar tickets through travel agents is cheaper than booking directly from the airline.

I used Oway for an in country flight as well as a hotel (they have a lot more hotels listed than any other site that I could see). From my perspective, Oway has a lot of promise, but is still new.

My main concern is that they charge your credit card PRIOR to confirming availability. While I had no problem getting the flight I wanted, for my hotel stay, they informed me a week after booking that there was no availability at the hotel I requested, and had instead confirmed me at a different hotel (which I had not chosen). I was traveling at this point and did not have the time or energy to fight it, and so I went with their choice even though it wasn't in the location I wanted and was a much worse hotel. Moreover, although they had promised to deliver the refund to my hotel (for the price difference between the two hotels), they never actually did (price difference was $15 USD).

So the advantage of Oway is that they show what is theoretically possible to book, but they will only confirm availability after you make a booking with them. They are responsive to emails though, so you would be better off contacting them via email and letting them know what you would like to book, have them confirm availability and THEN charge your credit card.