Whats On Chiang Mai

The Nakorn Ping Palace Hotel is an older, yet to be renovated, budget property just south of the Holiday Inn Chiang Mai, right behind the Nong Hoy Market. According to the front desk staff, Nakorn Ping Palace Hotel does not see many western tourists; most of their customers are from Thailand, China and Taiwan.  We toured the rooms and they were old, but clean.  Some of the rooms has nice views of the Mae Ping River and other rooms had nice views of the surrounding mountains.    Personally, I don’t think I would recommend staying at the Nakorn Ping Palace Hotel.  The rooms are old and the furnishings need to be updated.  However, it is a good landmark when you are looking for the Nong Hoy Market.   Travelers on a budget might find the property interesting, since the rates are quite low.

After some bad experiences with a few tailors making custom labels for my shirts, I found a nice embroidery shop, Raan Supat, 44/8 Wiang Ping Road, Chiang Mai, 50000. They make the custom labels for my custom shirts for about 50 baht each, which is a bit expensive because I think I can get them for 30 baht if I shop around more. The problem is that my labels are silk and Raan Supat does not keep small pieces of silk in the shop, so I will have to have a source for scrap pieces of different color silk material to make labels.

By the way, Wiang Ping Road is a very interesting place to visit if you want to see a non-tourist area very close to the center of Chiang Mai.

I have been staying at the Holiday Inn Chiang Mai, 318/1 Chiang Mai-Lamphun Rd., Chiang Mai, 50000, Thailand, Hotel Front Desk: 66-53-275300 and Hotel Fax: 66-53-275299, for over a month.   The Holiday Inn Chiang Mai, formerly a Westin and then a Sheraton, is a super value for the money.

Currently, I am booked at an amazing off season rate of 1360 THB per night using ThaiHotels.com as my discount agent.   This is a great deal for a true four star property in Chiang Mai.  Highly recommended.

We have stay at a number of places based on reviews on Trip Advisor in both Bangkok and Chiang Mai.  In almost every case, the ratings and reviews on Trip Advisor did not resemble the actual property.     In addition, when we submit accurate, factual reviews to Trip Advisor, they are not published.

Trip Advisor is simply a fraud.   Most of the reviews are fraudulent designed by property owners to boost their ratings.    The ratings have become so useless because of this fraud, that Trip Advisor should be classified as a fraudulent web site.   You cannot trust anything you read there.

Making matters worse, property owners and managers manipulate Trip Advisor as a part of their normal business operations, working hard to inflate their ratings by posting fraudulent reviews and encouraging their friends and employees to do the same.

Recently we stayed at two properties in Chiang Mai where the mattresses were so bad, worse than any we have seen.   When I complained to the manager of the Sira Boutique Hotel, his first reply was “we are highly rated on Trip Advisor.”   He seemed to imply that my complaint was not valid because of his Trip Advisor ratings.   Curious, I looked at all the Sira Boutique Hotel ratings and found that almost all of them were written by “people” who had created an account for the purpose of posting only one review.  This is a certain indicator of review fraud.

When I posted out to Trip Advisor their review fraud I was surprised to see that instead of acting on my complaint of review fraud, they simply deleted my factual reviews.    The simple fact of the matter is that Trip Advisor is a fraud.  Be very careful when you pick a Chiang Mai hotel or resort based on reviews on Trip Advisor.