Bangkok on a public holiday: what fills, what closes, where to stay

Not every public holiday changes anything. A handful reliably do. Songkran in mid-April is the largest by a distance: Thai New Year, several days long, and the one week where central Bangkok both empties of residents and fills with visitors at the same time. New Year, from around the 31st of December into January, is the other peak.

Chinese New Year, usually late January or February, is not a national public holiday but transforms Chinatown completely and fills hotels near it. Then there are the fixed royal and national dates spread through the year: Chakri Day in April, Coronation Day in May, the King's birthday in July, the Queen Mother's birthday in August, Chulalongkorn Day in October, and Father's Day and Constitution Day in December.

The Buddhist holidays move with the lunar calendar: Makha Bucha around February or March, Visakha Bucha in May, and Asalha Bucha with Khao Phansa in July. Those are the ones with the drinking rules attached, which is the section below. Because the dates shift each year, check the current calendar rather than assuming last year's dates repeat.

This is the part people misread. Hotels do not sell out evenly from the bottom up. The useful room types go first, and they go long before a property looks full on a booking site.

Twin rooms disappear early, because friends and family groups need two beds and there are fewer of them than doubles. Family and Triple rooms go earlier still, since almost every hotel has only a handful. Quiet floors, connecting rooms and anything with a cot go the same way. Meanwhile a standard king can sit available right up to the date, which makes the hotel look wide open when the room you actually need has been gone for weeks.

So the practical rule is: if your booking depends on a specific room type, treat the holiday as high season even in a month that is otherwise quiet. Arawana Regency Park Sukhumvit is the property with the Family and Triple rooms on Soi 22, and those are exactly the ones that go.

On the major Buddhist holidays (Makha Bucha, Visakha Bucha, and Asalha Bucha with Khao Phansa) alcohol sales stop across the country. Shops will not sell it, and most bars and restaurants do not serve it. This catches visitors out every single year, usually on the evening they had planned a rooftop.

It is worth knowing rather than resenting. These are among the most interesting days to be here: temples are busy in the best sense, with candlelit processions in the evening at many of them. Plan a temple evening instead of a bar one and the day becomes a highlight rather than a disappointment.

Separately, and this applies year-round rather than just on holidays, retail alcohol sales in Thailand run to restricted hours, broadly late morning to early afternoon, and again from the early evening until midnight. If you want something from a convenience store for later, buy it in the window rather than at four in the afternoon.

Bangkok traffic on a Thai public holiday is not simply worse, it is differently bad. The expressways out of the city clog as residents leave for their home provinces, particularly on the Friday and the returning Sunday evening. Inside the city, the office districts get quieter while the malls and the riverside get busier.

The trains, meanwhile, keep working exactly as they always do. This is the single biggest argument for staying somewhere with a station within walking distance on a holiday weekend. Everyone else is discovering what a forty-minute crawl feels like; you are on a train that takes the same eleven minutes it always did.

Temples and the Grand Palace are the other pressure point. On a public holiday they carry both the tourist crowd and Thai families making merit. If your schedule is flexible, move the Grand Palace to a normal weekday and use the holiday for something indoors or local.

The shape that works is local in the morning, indoors at midday, local again in the evening. Walk to Benjasiri Park early while it is cool and before the families arrive. It is a few minutes from the top of Soi 22 and it is at its best before nine.

When the heat and the traffic peak in the early afternoon, go into the Em District. Emporium, EmQuartier and EmSphere are within a few hundred metres of each other and connected by skywalk, which means you can spend the worst three hours of the day without stepping outside. On a holiday they will be busy, but busy indoors and air-conditioned beats quiet outdoors and thirty-six degrees.

Then eat on this side of Sukhumvit rather than crossing town for a booking. The point of a walkable soi on a holiday weekend is that dinner does not require a decision about traffic. If you want the full neighbourhood list, it is in 11 things to do near Sukhumvit 22.

On an ordinary trip a hotel pool is a nice extra. On a holiday weekend, especially one in the hot months, it is the thing that makes the middle of the day survivable without joining a mall crowd.

It matters most with children. A family that can swim between eleven and three does not have to negotiate a heat-stressed afternoon, and everybody arrives at dinner in a better mood. Regency Park has the pool, along with a sauna, a fitness room and an indoor garden.

If you are two adults who will be out all day regardless, that logic does not apply to you and Arawana Express Sukhumvit 22 on the same soi is the better spend. The full comparison between the two is in Regency Park or Express 22.

For Songkran and New Year, book as soon as your dates are fixed. Not when the rate looks good, not a month out: as soon as you know. Those two dates fill the useful room types months ahead and the rate is not going to improve by waiting.

For the smaller public holidays, a few weeks is usually comfortable unless you need a Family or Triple room, in which case treat it like the big two. For Chinese New Year specifically, the constraint is Chinatown rather than the city, so if Yaowarat is the reason for the trip, book Arawana Express Chinatown early.

When you book, say what you need in the notes: twin rather than double, a high floor, a cot, connecting rooms, a late arrival. All of those are usually possible weeks ahead and rarely possible on the afternoon itself. Booking direct puts that note in front of the desk that will check you in.