Travel Got Easy

Having now had a proper chance to settle into our new Airbnb in Chiang Mai, we’ve started to reflect upon what has changed about the city since the last time we visited it twelve years ago. Chiang Mai has certainly had a bit of a “glow up” since we were last here, with plenty of new modern shopping malls, Michelin-starred restaurants, high-end coffee shops, and trendy amenities catering to the rapidly growing number of tourists and expats that choose to come here every year. But something more profound has shifted, as well — with the proliferation of modern technologies in the form of apps and mobile connectivity, travel here has gotten easy.

Now, we don’t want to sound like the parents that tell their child that they had to walk to school uphill in both directions every day through raging snowstorms, but compared with our experience here twelve years ago, this visit to Chiang Mai has been relatively frictionless. Even with two young kids along for the ride.

Want to try some of the best Thai food in the city or test out the “secret spots” that were once only the purview of locals? Just look up the ratings for local restaurants on your handy Grab or FoodPanda app, choose what you want, and click “order.” A few minutes later, it will arrive at your door, delivered by a friendly local on a scooter. No trekking across the city, deciphering menus that are only written in Thai, or accidentally ordering the wrong thing. You can even provide dietary requests to the restaurant or delivery instructions to your driver that are automatically translated to Thai via the app. Compared with our experience in 2011, this is night and day.

Want to hitch a ride to another area of the city? No more walking around in the sweltering heat searching for available tuk tuks, negotiating prices (and paying the “tourist tax” every time), and getting lost on the way as you awkwardly try to explain to the driver where you’re heading. Now you can just order a car to your exact GPS coordinates via the Grab app, hop in to the pristinely clean and air conditioned car, and let the driver’s app direct them to whatever location you pinpointed as your destination. And as a bonus, you pay the same rates as locals every time.

Want to book a tour or excursion? No more wandering up to random tourist booths, booking things based on a photo menu without really knowing what you’re getting, and blindly handing money over to a stranger in the hopes that you aren’t just getting ripped off. Now you can just hop onto Klook or Viator, search for tours in your area, and choose the best one for you based on any number of parameters, from price, to rating, to whether or not it’s appropriate for kids.

In addition to making our lives easier, the introduction of these technologies has opened up a whole new world to us as visitors to the city, and allowed us to see and experience things we may not have had the courage to without them.

For example, a few days ago we took our son to a local Chiang Mai barber for a haircut. In 2011, we would never even have even attempted to walk into this place — it was clearly a local shop, tucked away in the back streets of a residential area, with no English signage in sight. Instead, we would have sought out a barber catering to expats in a more touristy area. But now, in 2023, we walked right in (albeit slightly hesitantly), armed with our Google Translate app, ready to request a haircut. The barber didn’t speak English. We don’t speak Thai. But we managed to communicate with each other, despite the misgendered voice that emerged from the phone. Our son got a great haircut. The barber made some incremental revenue from tourists. And we had a local experience at a reasonable cost. Win-win-win!

This trip of ours has very much been facilitated by technology. Mr. And Mrs. WorldSmith are both able to do some work remotely and help subsidize our travel as digital nomads, thanks to technologies like Zoom. We are able to live in homes with space for our whole family, instead of being cramped into hotel rooms, thanks to Airbnb. These homes have all been excellent in their own ways and given us a much more traditional or local experience of our destinations, which is attributable to the depth of information available on Airbnb. We have been able to search out the best possible prices and modes of payment for our travel using apps like Skyscanner (e.g. our car rental in Toronto was paid for in Vietnamese dong). And we can afford to eat like kings and get around so easily thanks to apps like Grab.

So, while we firmly believe that an important part of travel is about being uncomfortable at times — something that we think has been greatly reduced because of technology on our trip this far — the upside is that travel went and got easy. Which, to be honest, has been a bit of a relief on our first major trip with Little Miss and Young Mr. WorldSmith, since travelling with kids is hard enough, even with the modern conveniences technology has afforded us.

So no excuses, folks. The world is literally at your fingertips. Get out there and explore it!