Laos, tour company or DIY?

[BigDahliaFan]

We are in our 50s. I’ve not been to SE Asia since my back packing days and never been to Laos. Fairly seasoned travelers though. Thinking of using travel company as will have max 2 weeks and need connections etc to work.

If you can afford it I'd use a small independent travel company. If something goes wrong it's good to have help on your side when you have limited time. Someone to organise pickups from airports, or which bus to take does take a lot of the stress. We loved Luang Prabang and would have liked to spend more time in the country, particularly to travel around the north.

We're off to Cambodia & Vietnam in the summer with a company called Intrepid. We've travelled with them before and can highly recommend them. They have tours which include Laos and they do custom trips too

I’ve done Vietnam on our own and it was very easy to do. Super easy to book trains, planes and hostels or hotels. We never managed to get to Laos but I’d do it on my own it will save you so much money. There are loads of backpackers there so you don’t need an expensive tour.

Look at "incoming" tour operators, i.e., ones based in the region. Laos isn't an especially dynamic economy and so a lot of the tour operators are based in Vietnam and handle both countries. If you go with a UK-based company they will in most cases just be sending your requirements on to the same incoming operators and then adding 30% for their markup, plus VAT on the whole holiday.

Of course you need to do a bit of diligence to satisfy yourself that it's a real company, and if possible pay by credit card since there is no ATOL bonding, but when we did this recently for India we saved £££££ and had a great experience. In fact the logistics probably went better that way because we had a tour manager (who was in daily contact via WhatsApp, checking flights one time because there were delays and we might have missed a connection) who was in the same time zone as us.

I did DIY.

it was pretty easy.

Vientiane and Luang Prabang have lots of tourists and English is generally spoken.

it’s a lovely country.

Have been twice- diy both times and all very straightforward.
i used the website selective Asia for ideas.
The second time we flew from Hanoi and then back via Bangkok.

@ShanghaiDivahiya. Can you explain a bit more about the flights? Did you fly into and out of Laos or land transfer?

We flew in and out of Laos. We were living in China at the time so the first trip was via kunming in China to Vientiane and we took a Lao airline flight to Luang Prabang later in the trip. The second visit we were on holiday in Hanoi and flew direct to Luang Prabang, I think with Viet jet and then back via Bangkok with Bangkok city, I think.