Explore the Road
Rider's Recommend is a travel guide to Thailand, written for people who are actually going. Where to stay, where to eat, where to drink, which markets are on which evening, and what is worth a day of your trip. Every destination covered properly rather than listed. No affiliate padding, and no pretending we have been somewhere we have not.
Where we cover
The destinations below are the ones covered so far, and the list grows. Each has a page of its own and five more underneath it — hotels, food, bars, markets, attractions — so you can go straight to the thing you are actually deciding rather than reading around it.
How to use this site
If you know where you are going, start with the destination and work down. If you are still choosing, start with a subject — where to stay, what to eat, what to do — and see how the destinations differ. Every page ends with links to its siblings, so you can move sideways as easily as down.
What we try to get right
Orientation before recommendations. Knowing which road runs where, which beach is the loud one and which season belongs to which coast saves more time than any list of places ever will — so every page starts by telling you how the destination is laid out, and only then tells you what is in it.
How the site is organised
A page for each destination, and beneath it five more: hotels, restaurants, bars, markets and attractions. Above them sit the subject pages, which take one question at a time and compare the destinations on it. Whichever end you start from, you are two clicks from the other.
Start with a destination
Or with a subject
The subject pages are short on purpose. They give you the shape of the decision — which area, which season, what a thing costs — and then send you to the destinations for the detail.
What the badge means
A place marked “Tested by Rider’s Recommend” is one we visited and checked ourselves. Everything else on this site is researched, not personally visited — and we say so rather than blur the difference.
It is a fact rather than a rating. We do not give stars, because a star is an opinion and “we went there” is something you can hold us to.