About this site
Sources
The official registers, operators and other sources we check before publishing or changing anything on this site.
Checked 25 October 2026
These are the sources we go back to before we write or change anything on this site: government registers and embassies first, then the transport operators themselves, then local news, then what travellers are saying on the ground. It is not a complete bibliography of everything that exists on Laos travel, just the places we trust enough to build a page around. Not exhaustive, and we would rather leave something off than pad the list.
Government and immigration
The first stop for anything involving a visa, a border hour or an official rule. When a government site and a blog disagree, the government site wins, and we say so on the page rather than quietly picking a side.
Laos
- immigration.gov.la
- laoevisa.gov.la
- mofa.gov.la
- mpwt.gov.la
- kpl.gov.la
- tourismlaos.org
- laoairlines.com
- bol.gov.la
- laos.gov.la
- official provincial government websites
- provincial DPWT sources
- official railway/transport sources
- official airport sources
Thailand
- mfa.go.th
- consular.mfa.go.th
- immigration.go.th
- tdac.immigration.go.th
- customs.go.th
- tatnews.org
- tourismthailand.org
- Royal Thai Embassy, Washington D.C.: visa exemption
- Royal Thai Embassy, London: visa exemption and visa on arrival
- official Thai embassy/consulate websites
- official provincial authorities
Vietnam
- immigration.gov.vn
- evisa.gov.vn
- mofa.gov.vn
- official Vietnamese embassy/consulate websites
Cambodia
- immigration.gov.kh
- evisa.gov.kh
- mfaic.gov.kh
- tourismcambodia.com
- official Cambodian embassy/consulate sources
China
- nia.gov.cn
- mfa.gov.cn
- la.china-embassy.gov.cn
- 12306.cn
- official Chinese embassy/consulate sources
Transport operators and authorities
Railways, airlines, airports and whoever runs the crossing. We check fares, schedules and route claims here directly rather than take them on faith from a booking site.
- Laos-China Railway
- 12306
- Lao Airlines
- official Lao bus/transport authorities
- Thai transport authorities
- Vietnamese transport authorities
- Cambodian transport authorities
- airport authorities
- railway operators
- official border authorities
News
Good for catching that something has changed before the official version catches up. Never used to override a government source, only to flag that one might need rechecking.
- Laotian Times
- Vientiane Times
- KPL
- Lao National Radio
- Bangkok Post
- Nation Thailand
- Thai PBS
- Khmer Times
- Phnom Penh Post
- VnExpress
- Vietnam News
- Tuoi Tre
- Asia News Network
- Mekong River Commission
- relevant official/regional announcements
What travellers are saying
Forums, recent reviews, reports from people who crossed a border last week. This is where we first hear about a new unofficial fee or a shuttle that has stopped running. We treat it as a lead worth checking, not as fact until something else confirms it.
- Reddit (r/laos, r/LaosTravel, r/backpacking)
- relevant Facebook travel groups
- GT-Rider
- Wikivoyage
- Travelfish forums
- recent Google Maps reviews
- relevant travel forums
- recent traveller reports
When this list changes
The same way everything else here does: when a source stops being useful, gets replaced, or turns out to be wrong, it comes off this page too, not just off the pages that cited it.
Our own open data
We publish the files this whole site is built from, so anyone can check our work or reuse it, free under CC BY 4.0:
- the Laos border checkpoints register (checkpoints.json or CSV), where every crossing carries the date we last checked it and a link to its entry on the official Lao register;
- the route list (routes.json or CSV), with the border each route crosses, whether you can book it online and the sources we relied on;
- the Laos–China Railway timetable (laos-train-timetable.json): every train for the next seven days, read every morning from the railway's official LCR Ticket app;
- the Laos–China Railway GTFS feed (laos-china-railway-gtfs.zip): the railway timetable in standard GTFS Schedule format for transit and journey-planning apps;
- the Laos transport map (SVG), in all eight languages, redrawn from the files above.
You can also download the same files from GitHub or Hugging Face, refreshed there every day. On Kaggle, Laos shares one dataset with Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines.
To cite the data or the map in a report or article, use their permanent link on Zenodo: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23751855.