How far ahead to book Asia, country by country

Long-haul seats to Asia exist in quantity, on many airlines, at prices that move up and down rather than running out. Book eight weeks before departure and you will pay more, and you will get on a plane. That is not the constraint.

The constraint is everything on the ground that exists in units of eight, or twelve, or thirty. The eight-room ryokan. The twelve-room island resort. The mountain lodge at the right altitude on the right night. The permit with a quota. The reserved train seat that goes on sale at a fixed moment and sells out that morning. None of those scale, and no amount of budget conjures another one into existence.

So this is organised around bottlenecks rather than around flights.

Lead times by country and season

Lead time here means the point at which we want your dates locked and the ground arrangements confirmed. Add a month or two for the conversation itself.

Two rules sit behind that table. Christmas and New Year is its own season everywhere, frequently nine to twelve months for the best small properties. And domestic holidays matter more than foreign ones: Tet, Golden Week, Songkran, Chuseok and Holy Week fill transport and accommodation with local travellers long before international demand appears.

The bottlenecks, in detail

Japan: eight rooms and nine seats

The Japanese bottleneck is not a hotel category, it is a size. A good ryokan has eight to twenty rooms and its regulars rebook a year out. The counter restaurants worth planning a night around seat eight or nine people, take reservations by telephone in Japanese, and in some cases open their book exactly 30 days ahead and fill it that day.

For late March to early May and for October to November, six to nine months. Our Tokyo office makes the restaurant calls. Golden Week in late April and early May is a national travel week: we plan around it rather than through it. See our Japan guide and the classic fourteen days. Where a specific booking window applies, we confirm the number for your dates rather than working from last year’s.

India: permits and the palace rooms

The e-visa is the thing people worry about and rarely the thing that bites. Official guidance allows applications reasonably close to departure, but we ask clients to apply several weeks ahead because applications are sometimes queried and photographs rejected for trivial reasons. The fee and the validity categories change, so we confirm the current figure before you apply.

The genuine bottlenecks are elsewhere:

• Safari permits. Zones at Ranthambore, Bandhavgarh and Kanha are released on a schedule and the good zones go quickly. Our Delhi office books them at release.
• Restricted-area permits for parts of Ladakh, plus Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and the Andamans. These go through a registered agency on the ground and the conditions have changed more than once. Do not plan on sorting it out locally.
• Train reservations, which open roughly two months ahead, with the good trains filling quickly.
• The famous heritage hotels, where Christmas and New Year rates are the highest of the year and the rooms with the view go first.

Sri Lanka: a thirty-day window you cannot beat

The clearest example on this list of a bottleneck that is a moment rather than a duration. Reserved seats on the Kandy to Ella hill country line go on sale a limited number of days before departure, currently around 30, and the good classes frequently sell out on the day of release in high season. There is no way to buy earlier through the railway, and the resale sites at the top of search results are buying the same tickets on the same morning with a margin attached.

So the sequence matters more than the lead time. Lock the date, then buy at the moment the window opens. That window has moved before, so we confirm the current one for your dates. The full picture is in the Kandy to Ella train. Everything else in Sri Lanka is a small-property problem: estate bungalows and south coast villas with a handful of rooms, six to nine months for Christmas, New Year and the Esala Perahera.

Nepal: a teahouse and a seat on a small aircraft

Two physical limits. Teahouses on the popular trails fill by early afternoon in October and November, and there is no overflow. Flights to the mountain airstrips are small aircraft on weather-dependent schedules, and in peak season the seats are spoken for.

Six to nine months for October and November. Every Everest-region itinerary also needs buffer days for cancelled flights. Permits and a licensed guide are required for trekking in the national parks, and independent solo trekking is no longer permitted, so that arrangement has to exist before you fly. See our Nepal hub and the Annapurna teahouse trek.

Vietnam: boats, caves and Tet

The bay boats worth being on carry a small number of cabins and the good ones book out in the October to April window. Phong Nha’s larger cave expeditions run on a permit system with a strict annual quota and a limited number of departures, and those genuinely do sell out a season ahead.

Then Tet, the Lunar New Year, which moves each year between late January and mid February. In the week around it, domestic flights and trains sell out months ahead at double the price, family-run restaurants close and museums shut for several days. We always tell you where your dates fall relative to it.

Thailand: the fortnight that goes twelve months out

The Andaman coast from November to March is the reliable window and the busiest, and the fortnight around Christmas and New Year sells out in Krabi and on the small islands nine to twelve months ahead. Outside that, two to three months is comfortable, which makes Thailand one of the easier countries to book late.

Songkran, 13 to 15 April, is the other date that matters. Domestic transport books out months ahead and much of the country shuts. We build around it or route around it.

The Philippines: twelve to thirty rooms

The bottleneck is the resorts. The properties worth flying to have twelve to thirty rooms and they fill for February to April six to nine months ahead. Late December to early January is a domestic peak at two to three times shoulder rates, and Holy Week is the busiest domestic travel week of the year.

The internal flights are cheap and frequent, and the risk is not availability but construction: a bad connection through Manila’s unlinked terminals costs a day.

South Korea and Cambodia: the two easiest to leave late

Korea runs at three to four months for most of the year, six for October and longer if your dates touch Chuseok or the blossom weeks. What fills the trains and the small hotels is Korean travellers rather than international ones. The travel authorisation rules and exemptions change, so we confirm the current requirement for your passport before we quote.

Cambodia is comfortable at six months for November to March, and three is tight rather than impossible. Siem Reap and the islands book out earliest over Christmas and New Year, and Khmer New Year in mid-April empties Phnom Penh and fills Siem Reap with Cambodian families.

What to book first, in order

If you take one thing from this article, take the sequence.

1. Dates, decided against the season rather than against your calendar. Monsoon in Asia is the argument for that order.
2. The scarce ground pieces: the ryokan, the island resort, the trail lodges, the bay boat, the permit.
3. Internal flights, once the route is fixed.
4. International flights. Genuinely last, or at least last-but-one.
5. Reserved seats with a fixed release window, bought the moment they open, which may be after everything else is paid for.

Almost everyone planning alone reverses that order, which is why the answer to “we booked our flights, can you build us a trip” is sometimes that the trip we would build no longer fits the dates.

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Keep reading

• Japan, at the pace you actually want to travel it
• Japan: the complete guide to planning your trip
• Monsoon in Asia: which countries it actually ruins
• The Kandy to Ella train, and how to actually get a seat
• India for the first time: a realistic first itinerary

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