What a trip to Myanmar costs

Before any of that: Myanmar is available from us on request and subject to conditions on the ground, and we assess every enquiry against the situation at the time and for your specific dates before we quote. We decline regularly. The numbers below describe what a trip costs when we are willing to run one. They are not a statement that we can run yours. The full position is on our complete Myanmar guide.

Everything here is land only, per person, based on two people sharing a room. It includes accommodation, food, ground transport with a driver, domestic flights inside Myanmar, entry and zone fees and guiding. It excludes international flights, which we quote separately.

The four budgets

Applied to the lengths that actually work:

The gap between comfortable and boutique is wider in Myanmar than in Thailand or Vietnam, and that is worth understanding before you choose. In Bangkok, $300 a day buys a noticeably better version of the same trip. In Bagan, it buys one of maybe four properties, and the rest of the day is identical to the $180 version. You are paying for the room, not for the country.

Ten days, priced line by line

The route in every case is the standard first trip: Yangon, Bagan, Inle Lake and Mandalay, with two internal flights and a road or river leg between Bagan and Mandalay. See classic Myanmar in 10 days.

Careful, ten days, about $1,100

This is a real trip and not a compromised one. Burmese hotels in the $35 to $50 range are usually clean, family run and perfectly pleasant. What you lose is air conditioning that works well in April, a pool to retreat to in the afternoon, and a guide on the days you did not think you needed one.

Comfortable, ten days, about $1,800

This is what we build most often, and the line that changes the trip most is the last one. Guiding in Myanmar is cheap and very good, and a guide who can read a temple wall and talk to a village headman is worth more here than a better hotel room.

Boutique, ten days, about $3,000

Look at where the money goes. Accommodation more than doubles and everything else moves very little, because everything else already cost what it costs. See boutique Myanmar in 10 days.

Luxury, ten days, about $5,200

At this level we are booking the best room in the best property in each place, and in one or two towns on the route that is still a good four star hotel rather than anything more. We will say so in the proposal rather than let you discover it.

Accommodation, town by town

Planning ranges, per room per night for two sharing, including breakfast.

Mandalay is the town where extra money buys least. Bagan is where it buys most, because two or three properties there are genuinely lovely and sit in gardens among the temples.

The lines people forget

Domestic flights. Around $100 to $150 per leg, and most ten day routes have two. They are a bigger share of a short trip than of a long one, which is one of several reasons a seven day Myanmar trip prices badly.

Zone and entry fees. Bagan and Inle both charge an area fee, there are separate charges at Shwedagon, the Mandalay area sites and elsewhere, and they are payable in cash. The amounts are set by the authorities and have changed more than once, so we confirm the current figures for your dates rather than printing a number here that may be wrong by the time you read it.

The balloon at Bagan. Not included in any of the figures above. When operators are flying it is roughly $380 to $480 per person for about 45 minutes in the air. It runs in the dry season only, it cancels for wind, and it does not run every season. We will never present it as a certainty. The argument for and against is in Bagan in three days.

Tipping. Modest and expected for guides and drivers. Budget $10 to $15 a day for a guide and $5 to $8 for a driver, per party rather than per person, in cash.

Money, and this is the part that matters

Myanmar is effectively a cash economy for a visitor. International cards work in a very small number of places, mainly a handful of hotels in Yangon, and even there they fail often. ATMs cannot be relied on. The banking system has been disrupted since 2021 and remains so.

So you carry US dollars in notes, and the condition of the notes matters more than almost anyone expects:

• Recent series, clean, flat, unfolded
• No pen marks, no stamps, no writing of any kind
• No tears, no tape, no soft or worn edges
• A crease down the middle is enough to have a note refused
• Larger denominations often exchange at a better rate than small ones

Get them from your own bank, ask specifically for new notes, and carry them flat in an envelope rather than folded in a wallet. A refused note is not a negotiation. The counter simply hands it back.

Exchange is the other half of this. The official rate, the practical rate and the rules about where and how currency may legally be changed have all moved repeatedly since 2021, sometimes at short notice. This is not something to work out on arrival from a blog post written two years ago.

What we do about it: every client we send to Myanmar gets a written cash briefing before departure, current at the time of travel, that tells you how much to bring, in what denominations, what will be paid locally and what has already been paid, and where money is exchanged. It is the single most useful practical thing we produce for this destination, and it is the thing independent travellers get wrong most often.

What moves the total

How many of you there are. The car, the driver and the guide are per day, not per person. Four people travelling together pay roughly half the transport and guiding element that two do.

When you go. November to February is the season and is priced as such. March to May is hot enough to be difficult and is correspondingly cheap. See Myanmar month by month.

How many internal flights. Each one is money and, more importantly, a point of failure. Longer trips with fewer flights per day are better value in every sense. See how many days you need.

Whether the route holds together. If conditions mean part of a route cannot run, we rebuild it rather than run a thinner version of it, and the price changes with the route.

Related

• Myanmar: the complete guide to planning your trip
• How many days do you need in Myanmar?
• Myanmar month by month
• Myanmar for the first time
• All our Myanmar trips

Frequently asked questions