About

Alphatravelguide.com is a small independent travel site. There is no agency behind it and no editorial team. It is one traveler writing down what he has learned on the road, so that the next person does not have to learn it the hard way.

Who writes this site

Hi, I am Oleg. I am based in Europe and I have been traveling independently for most of my adult life. No tour operators, no package deals. I plan my own routes, pick my own hotels and work out visas, transport and budgets myself, and I have done it in dozens of countries across Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

Some places I did not just visit but lived in for a while: Thailand, Bali, Vietnam and Malaysia in Southeast Asia, Italy in Europe, and Uzbekistan in Central Asia. Living somewhere changes what you notice. You stop caring about the top ten sights and start caring about which neighborhood is quiet at night, where the locals eat, how the transit card actually works and what a fair taxi fare looks like. Those are the details that end up in the guides here.

Over the years I found myself answering the same questions for friends again and again. How do you get in, where should you stay, what does a week really cost, what is worth a day trip and what is a tourist trap. This site is where those answers now live, written down once and kept up to date.

How I travel

My trips are usually short and dense. One or two weeks, several cities, an early train more often than a late breakfast. I like comfort but I refuse to overpay for it. That means a clean hotel in the right district rather than a resort with a brand name, public transport where it works and a taxi where it does not, street food for lunch and a good restaurant for dinner. I fly on the cheapest sensible fare and I am happy to take a layover if it saves real money.

I write for people who travel the same way. You want to see a place on your own terms, you care about value for money, and you would rather read one honest page than ten pages of hotel advertising dressed up as advice.

What you will find here

The guides currently cover destinations across Asia, the Middle East and Central Asia, from Thailand and the Emirates to the Silk Road cities of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and the list keeps growing. Every destination gets the same set of practical questions. Entry and visa rules for this year, how to get from the airport, where guests rate hotels highest, what a week costs on a real budget, and which day trips are worth the early alarm.

Next to the city guides there is a series of data studies. The Thailand hotel guest score study compares 173 of the most booked hotels across four cities using 176,733 verified Booking.com reviews collected between April and July 2026. There are similar studies for China, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and Uzbekistan. Any figure from these studies may be quoted freely with a link back to the source page.

How the guides are made

• Sources. Visa and entry rules come from official government and embassy pages and are dated in the text. Hotel ratings and review counts come from Booking.com. Fares and schedules reflect airline and aggregator data at the time of writing. Prices move, so every price in a guide is an estimate for the season it names.
• Updates. Guides carry a last-updated date. Visa and entry articles are rechecked when the rules change. Hotel studies are rerun with fresh data once a year.
• Photos. Photographs come from open licensed sources such as Pexels and Pixabay unless a caption says otherwise, and remain the property of their creators.

How the site pays for itself

Some links on this site are affiliate links, mainly to Booking.com, Trip.com, GetYourGuide and Viator. If you book through one of them, the site earns a small commission. You pay the same price either way. Affiliate links are marked with a sponsored attribute so that search engines treat them correctly, and they open in a new tab. No hotel, airline or tour operator has paid to appear in a guide or to get a better rating. The hotel studies rank properties by guest scores alone.

Corrections

If you spot an error, an outdated price or a visa rule that has changed, please use the contact form. Corrections go straight into the article and the last-updated date is refreshed. Substantive changes to the data studies are noted at the bottom of the study.

Get in touch

The contact page is the best way to reach me. I read every message, even if the reply takes a few days. Questions about a destination, a hotel that turned out worse than its score, a tip about a place I should cover next: all of it is welcome.