ABOUTAsia Travel

ABOUTAsia Travel operates from Siem Reap, Cambodia, where founder Andrew Booth relocated in 2007 after realizing that conventional tourism kept most visitor spending outside the region. Having worked as an international investment banker before his move, Booth set out to build a company that paired exceptional travel experiences with genuine community benefit. The result is a firm that designs fully customized private tours across Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam for individual travelers seeking depth and authenticity, not standard itineraries. The company has earned recognition as a Travel + Leisure A-List advisor and Condé Nast Top Travel Specialist, and Booth himself received an O.B.E. honor in 2017 for his contributions to children's education in Cambodia.

What sets ABOUTAsia apart is their detailed research into visitor flow patterns at Angkor Wat. Rather than simply claiming to offer "crowd-free" experiences, they have developed a proprietary system based on surveillance walks, footfall counts, and pedestrian traffic surveys. This data-driven approach means their guides understand exactly when and where to visit each temple within the vast Angkor Archaeological Park to minimize crowds while maximizing the visual and historical impact of the site. For travelers interested in Angkor, this level of specificity addresses a genuine problem: the temples receive hundreds of thousands of visitors annually, and poorly timed visits often mean moving through dense groups rather than experiencing these monuments. ABOUTAsia's tours are designed so clients encounter a very different Angkor than typical organized groups see, guided by experts who can contextualize what they are looking at with deep knowledge of the history and architecture.

The customization process begins with a conversation about what draws you to the region and how you prefer to travel. The team works with each client to build an itinerary suited to their interests, schedule, and budget, incorporating accommodation choices, activity preferences, and pace of travel. Guides are educated specialists who can speak authoritatively about temple history, local culture, and regional geography. The company emphasizes small-group or private travel rather than congregating clients into larger organized tours, so your experience reflects your particular interests and travel style. Tours can focus narrowly on Angkor temples, expand across Cambodia's coast and countryside, or branch into Laos and Vietnam depending on what you want to explore.

Pricing varies based on the scope and style of travel, with their signature Angkor Without The Crowds tour starting around $952 per person for a guided experience. Broader multi-country journeys and luxury accommodations adjust the cost upward accordingly. The company does not publish fixed pricing online, instead requesting conversations to understand what you are looking for so they can provide accurate estimates. This approach reflects the genuinely bespoke nature of their work: a week-long private journey with luxury villas and expert guides costs something very different from a three-day guided temple experience, and attempts to list standardized prices would mislead both budget-conscious and luxury travelers.

The profits ABOUTAsia generates support ABOUTAsia Schools, their partner nonprofit that provides educational resources and support to rural Cambodian schools. By the early 2010s, this effort had reached over fifty thousand students across more than one hundred schools. This commitment to reinvesting in the community distinguishes the company from operators that simply extract tourism revenue and move on. For many clients, the knowledge that their spending directly supports Cambodian education alongside delivering an exceptional travel experience itself becomes part of what makes the trip meaningful.

ABOUTAsia's appeal extends beyond Angkor specialists. They design multi-week journeys through the Mekong Delta, Vietnam's central coast, or the mountains and forests of northern Laos. For travelers seeking something more layered than destination guides provide, their itineraries often weave in encounters with local artisans, visits to lesser-known historical sites, and immersive cultural experiences. The company's long tenure in the region (established in 2008) and deep local networks mean they can arrange access and guidance that newer operators or those working from overseas offices cannot easily replicate.

A traveler choosing ABOUTAsia is making two commitments: the first is to move at the pace and rhythm that the region demands and that the itinerary is designed around, rather than racing through a checklist of sights. The second is to align travel spending with local benefit, supporting a model that keeps tourism revenue in the communities being visited. The combination of research-backed expertise at sites like Angkor, genuine customization, and clear commitment to community impact makes them a strong choice for travelers who want their Southeast Asia journey to reflect thought and intention rather than simply following an established tour formula.

The Angkor temples themselves deserve explanation for those unfamiliar with the site. Angkor Wat is the largest religious monument in the world, constructed in the early twelfth century as a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu and later transformed into a Buddhist temple. The complex encompasses hundreds of additional temples, from small shrines to massive stone structures like the Bayon, famous for its fifty-four towers carved with giant stone faces. The entire area sprawls across hundreds of square kilometers, which means planning an Angkor visit requires understanding not just what to see but how to move through the site efficiently without succumbing to heat exhaustion or crowding. A guide who knows the optimal times to visit the Bayon to catch particular light conditions, who understands the architectural evolution from Angkor Wat to the later temples, and who can speak to the history of the Khmer Empire that built these monuments transforms a series of impressive buildings into an intelligible narrative. That is what ABOUTAsia's experts provide.

Beyond Angkor, the region around Siem Reap and throughout Cambodia offers layered travel possibilities. The Cambodian coast, rarely featured in standard itineraries, provides beach and island experiences without the tourism infrastructure saturation of Thailand's islands. Kampot, a seaside town, has colonial architecture and pepper plantations. The islands of Koh Rong and Koh Rong Sanloem offer diving, snorkeling, and relative quiet. Travels into southern Laos through the Mekong Delta let visitors encounter floating villages, meet local fishermen and farmers, and see how river communities actually live. Northern Laos, particularly around Luang Prabang, has temples, hill tribe encounters, and landscapes that feel worlds away from the tourist zones. Vietnam's routing through the itinerary can emphasize any of several themes: the history of French colonial influence, the contemporary food culture, the textiles and handicrafts, or the varied landscapes from rice paddies to limestone karsts.

ABOUTAsia's founding narrative itself holds appeal for travelers who want their spending to matter beyond simple economic exchange. Booth's realization that tourism revenue was leaving Cambodia rather than staying and benefiting communities is not unique to him, but acting on that insight by relocating his family to Cambodia to build a company around it demonstrates commitment. Over the years, the partnership with ABOUTAsia Schools has become substantial enough to make a measurable difference in educational access across rural regions. Travelers who value impact tourism, meaning travel that produces positive change in the places visited, find in ABOUTAsia an operator whose values align with their own.