Bangkok

Bangkok is where nearly every UK trip to Thailand begins, and it rewards a clear plan more than a long stay. The city is hot, sprawling and snarled with traffic, but the bits travellers come for cluster neatly: the Grand Palace, Wat Pho and Wat Arun sit within a riverbend in the old town, the Skytrain threads the modern east, and the river itself is the fastest, prettiest way between them. Get the headline temples done in one early morning before the heat and tour buses land, and the rest of the city opens up — Chinatown food after dark, a rooftop bar over the skyline, a massage that costs less than a London pint.

Three nights is the right length for most people: enough for the temples, a river afternoon, a Chinatown dinner and one day trip out to Ayutthaya’s ruins or the Damnoen Saduak and Maeklong markets, without lingering past the point where you start dreaming of an island. Where you base yourself decides how much of each day you lose to traffic — Sukhumvit for the trains, the old town for the temples — so that call matters more than the hotel itself.

The structured planning below picks up from here: where to stay by area, what the Grand Palace ticket and dress code actually involve, how to get in from Suvarnabhumi cheaply, a realistic budget in pounds, and the months that make a Bangkok temple morning bearable rather than brutal.