Millionaire or backpacker, a guide to the best of Cambodia - from helitours to tuk tuks
Once a backpackers’ haven, Cambodia is shaking off its image as a cheap holiday destination to dive into the realms of luxury. Here’s how to enjoy it whatever your budget
Once awash with cheap guest houses, and a place where meals could be had for a couple of US dollars and beers for 50 cents, Cambodia ticked all the boxes for budget travellers.
In recent years, however, it has started to shed its reputation as a backpackers’ paradise with a steady rise in luxury offerings. And this trend looks set to boom in 2017 with the opening of some top-class hotels that will take the country back to its heyday. These include a Rosewood hotel in Phnom Penh, Six Senses Krabey Island and Alila on Koh Russey – both private island resorts off the coast of Sihanoukville.
“It didn’t used to be known as a budget destination,” says Andy Booth, CEO and founder of luxury tour operator AboutAsia Travel. Charlie Chaplin visited the Angkor Wat temple in the late 1930s, when travel was expensive and reserved for the wealthy, and coastal Kep was French Indochina’s premier seaside resort in the 1950s and ’60s.
Decades of war wrecked the country, and it only began opening up to tourism again in the early 1990s. The backpacker rush started a few years later, and a tourism boom began around 2005 , when high-end hotels opened in Siem Reap, gateway to the Unesco World Heritage-listed Angkor temples complex.
“The demand in Siem Reap has led to this demand for luxury being extended across Cambodia,” says Andrew Carroll, global head of marketing and sales at Exotic Voyages.