Housing fifteen people under one roof.

The arithmetic nobody does in advance

A typical extended family group that reaches our desk looks something like this: a principal and his wife, two or three married children with spouses, six or seven grandchildren of assorted ages, one or two grandparents, and then the household, which might be a nanny, a nurse, a cook and two drivers. That is fifteen to twenty people in seven to ten rooms, and it will not fit into a standard reservation. Booked room by room on a hotel website it produces a scatter of rooms across five floors, no shared sitting space, staff placed nowhere in particular, and a family that spends the first evening trying to find each other.

Booked properly it produces a floor, or half of one, arranged so that the generations sit where they should, with one large suite functioning as the household's sitting room and the staff placed within reach but not among the family. The difference in cost between the two versions is often small. The difference in the quality of the stay is the whole trip.

Connecting is not adjoining

The single most common booking failure we untangle comes from this distinction. A connecting room shares an internal door with the room beside it, so a parent can pass into the children's room without entering the corridor. An adjoining room is simply next door with no internal door. Booking systems and even hotel staff use the words loosely, and a request field marked connecting rooms preferred carries no weight at all. What carries weight is a confirmation naming specific room numbers, stating that they connect, issued by the hotel's reservations or groups team, and repeated in the final confirmation a week before arrival.

Connecting stock is finite in every hotel, and river-facing or view-facing connecting pairs are the scarcest inventory in the building. In high season and around both Eids they go months ahead. For a family that genuinely needs four connecting pairs, the booking has to be made early and held, and a hotel that will not confirm specific numbers is telling you something useful about how the stay will go.

Floor takeovers and wings

Above roughly eight rooms, ask about a floor rather than a set of rooms. Many hotels will sell a full floor or a defined wing of one, and some will do it at a rate close to the sum of the rooms because it simplifies their housekeeping. What the family gets in return is substantial: a corridor that belongs to the party, no strangers passing bedroom doors, children able to move between rooms freely, lift access that can sometimes be key-carded to the floor, and the ability to run the floor to the household's own hours. For families where the women of the party want to move between rooms without covering, a private corridor is not a luxury, it is the requirement, and it is worth paying for.

Resorts offer the equivalent in a different shape. A cluster of pool villas taken together, or a two or three villa compound within a larger estate, gives the same containment with the addition of private outdoor space. In Phuket and Samui this is often the better answer than a hotel floor, and our guides to the west coast villas and the walled villa treat the verification in full.

The sitting room problem

Gulf households sit together in the evening, and fifteen people do not sit in a hotel bedroom. This is the requirement most often missed in a booking and the one that most reliably determines whether the family enjoys the stay. There are three workable solutions, and the right one depends on the property. Take a presidential or diplomatic suite with a genuine reception room, generous seating and its own dining table, and use it as the household's majlis while the family sleeps in the rooms around it. Or hire a small function room or private dining room on a standing nightly basis, which several Bangkok hotels will do at a modest rate for a long booking, and have it furnished with seating rather than banquet rows.

Or, in a resort, take a villa with a large covered terrace and treat that as the sitting room. The one solution we advise against is relying on an executive club lounge. Lounges have capacity limits, other guests, fixed hours, and almost always serve alcohol in the evening, none of which suits a family gathering that runs past midnight. Ask instead for the private room, and specify what should be in it: seating for the full party, side tables, Arabic coffee and dates service, tea through the evening, and no alcohol served or stored in the room.

Where the staff sleep

Accompanying staff are part of the household and need to be housed properly, and hotels vary widely in how they handle this. Some sell standard rooms at a reduced staff rate on a lower floor. Some have dedicated staff rooms attached to larger suites, which is the ideal arrangement for a nanny or a nurse who needs to be within call at night. Some, particularly at the very top of the market, have restrictive policies about staff using guest facilities, and it is far better to know that before arrival than to discover it when a driver is turned away from a restaurant.

• Whether staff rooms exist attached to the suites, and on which floors
• The staff rate and whether it includes breakfast or a meal allowance
• Which facilities accompanying staff may use, and at what hours
• Whether staff may hold their own key cards and lift access to the family's floor
• Where drivers wait, whether there is a drivers' room, and the parking arrangement
• Meal arrangements for staff, and whether they may be charged to the master account
• For a nurse or a carer, whether a bed may be placed in the principal's suite

Contract, billing and the arrival

Above about eight rooms, a hotel will usually move the booking to its groups team and issue a contract rather than a reservation, and that is to the family's advantage. In it, settle the rate and what it includes, the specific rooms by number, the deposit and payment schedule, the cancellation and attrition terms in case relatives drop out, and the billing structure. The billing structure matters more than people expect: a master account carrying rooms, private dining, transport and staff, with incidentals either routed to it or blocked entirely, prevents fifteen separate conversations at checkout. Where the family prefers, individual rooms can be closed to charging altogether.

The arrival itself is worth choreographing. A party of fifteen arriving at once from a Gulf flight at one in the morning, with twenty-five pieces of luggage and two grandparents, should not be standing in a lobby. We pre-register everybody, have keys cut and sorted into named envelopes, arrange a side entrance where the property has one, send enough vehicles that nobody waits at the airport, and ask the kitchen to hold a simple supper. The whole party should go from car to rooms in under ten minutes. Departure gets the same treatment in reverse, with a late checkout or a day room held for the family to gather in before the evening flight home.

Connecting room inventory, staff policies and group contract terms differ from property to property and change with management. Confirm specific room numbers, connecting doors, staff accommodation and billing arrangements in writing with the hotel's groups or reservations team before paying a deposit, and re-confirm the room list a week before arrival.

This briefing is general information, not legal, tax or investment advice. Thai rules change frequently and individual cases differ. Verify current requirements with the relevant authorities, including the Immigration Bureau, the Board of Investment, the Land Department, the Department of Business Development and the Revenue Department, and take advice on your own facts before acting.