Booking a Thai massage without speaking Thai

In a lot of tourist areas in Thailand you can just walk into a massage shop, check the price board and lie down. Easy.

It gets trickier when you want a specific time, a popular place, or two people at once. That’s when a quick call saves you a wasted walk across town.

What to ask for

• The kind of massage: traditional Thai, foot, oil, or something else on their list.
• How long. Shops usually sell set lengths, such as 60, 90 or 120 minutes.
• The time you want, and whether a bit earlier or later works.
• How many people, and whether you’d like to be in the same room.

Telling the time, the Thai way

Thai has its own everyday way of saying the time, split into parts of the day. Five in the afternoon is ห้าโมงเย็น (haa mong yen), roughly “five o’clock, evening”. You don’t need to learn the system, but it’s why a quick “5 pm” in English doesn’t always land on the phone.

The small words that matter

Polite Thai sentences often end with a particle: ครับ (khrap) from male speakers and ค่ะ or คะ (kha) from female speakers. Leaving them out can sound a bit blunt.

In our demo you can hear both. Alfred’s Thai voice ends its question with ครับ, and the shop answers with ค่ะ:

On the day

Turn up a few minutes early, and call if you’re running late, because a booked slot is often someone else’s next appointment. A tip for your therapist is common and appreciated.

That’s it. No phrasebook gymnastics needed.