Boy, are you going to be disappointed. There's no such thing as Internet rates in Laos. There are only rates.

You must remember that Lao hotels, while they may have Internet access, will struggle for several years before they communicate efficiently with the outside world. For example, two months ago I was a speaker at an Internet conference in Vientiane and Luang Prabang. 70 hotel personnel attended in Vientiane, and approximately 28 of them said they had Internet accounts. 140 hotel personnel attended in Luang Prabang, and approximately 14 of them said they had Internet accounts. (More revealing than that, the majority of Laotians attending didn't speak English or own a PC.)

Remember, too, that Internet accounts aren't created equal. For example, there's no ISP in Luang Prabang, so hotels must call Vientiane first. And there's a weakness in the local telephone system. Communication between Luang Prabang and Vientiane is handled by microwave transmitters powered by the sun. You can forget reliable telephone connections on cloudy, rainy days.

Another Internet wrinkle is that most accounts held in Laos are via outfits like Hotmail, which means holders of such accounts must patronize cyber cafes to conduct business, and also indicates they don't own computers. It's also why so much inbound email is subject to slow response times. (In other words, hotels in Laos use the Internet as a sort of glorified fax machine, and there never were fax rates.)

Another thing to keep in mind, especially in the case of Luang Prabang, is that it's a sellers market. No hotels have been built since the Southeast Asian economic crisis of July 1997. Yet more and more travelers arrive via new checkpoints, on better roads, and as passengers on twice the number of Lao-bound flights. To boot, there's even visa-on-arrival. None of these improvements was in place three years ago.

Getting back to the myth of Internet rates, you have to understand how rates work. There's the traditional rack rate, which is what you pay when you arrive unannounced. Travel agencies negotiate so-called contract rates. Contract rates may be 50% less than rack rates for volume suppliers. Whether you deal with hotels directly, or travel agencies directly, or browse websites that indirectly host hotels, you're generally going to pay close to rack rates because you aren't a volume supplier.

A good example of these varying arrangements is Phuket, the Thai resort island. Hoteliers openly admit to charging 25% above contract rates when individual travelers make Internet bookings. Moreover, they also admit that perhaps not much more than 5% of their bookings are generated by travelers using the Internet, so there's no need to make significant discounts to this small market.

What we do every day is micro-manage email messages, handle them manually, call hotels one by one, and find out whether there's room for you or not. This is labor intensive, and you should see my telephone bill at the end of the month.

Our big advantage, of course, is that we're here. We know the hotel people, the airline people, and the car rental people, etc. We get results within hours, meaning the same working day we receive your email. But you should forget about Internet rates as touted in North America and Western Europe. We aren't there yet. But we do make wheels go 'round. We efficiently assist you because we know the market inside and out.

See you in Laos,

James Michener (aka Mekong Jim)

Mekong Express Home	- Laos Home -	Editor for Mekong Express