Asia: where getting onto the list is cheaper than you would think

Four Asian glamping lists, measured data for forty accommodations. The most important thing is not the price level but that the "ten best" lists often rest on five or six reviews. For a Hungarian place just starting out, this is rather good news.

Beyond Europe · October 2026

After our European round we looked at what the same page family shows from Asia: the glamping selections of Japan, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. We collected the data of forty accommodations by machine, not by eye: name, type label, score, review count and the displayed price.

The expected result would have been the price level. The more interesting finding is what stands behind a "ten best" score.

The "ten best" list is often made from a very small sample

On the same page two lists of ten run one below the other: the "ten best" and the "most booked this month". They do not hold the same places, and the places are not the same size either.

On the Japanese "ten best" list the median review count of the entries is 92, and four entries are below 20 reviews:

In Vietnam the same: MK Home, 10 points from 5 reviews, Trạm Mây Glamping 9.6 points from 8.

Meanwhile on the other list, among the most booked, the median review count of the Japanese entries is 547, six times that of the "best".

This means that the "best" list does not gather the largest or the best known places, but those whose average happens to be high. An average of ten from six reviews is not proof of performance but a small sample. Anyone reading from such a list that "the standard on the Asian glamping market is above 9" is in fact looking at the opinions of a few dozen guests.

And why this is good news for a place starting out

Turn it around. If a national "ten best" selection can be entered with six good reviews, then getting onto the list is not a question of size but of the first few guests.

This is the one thing in this article that can be acted on at home immediately: the first ten guests of a new Hungarian place are not ten bookings but the next two years of visibility. Not because they bring a lot of money, but because they write the average on the basis of which the selection takes a place in or leaves it out.

What we do not claim: we do not know whether the Hungarian page selects by the same logic. What we measured is that this is the pattern on four Asian lists. Whether the editorial rule is the same from country to country, we have no source for.

In Asia the glamping word filters even less than in Western Europe

In our Western European article we found that accommodation nobody would call glamping also gets under the glamping label. There we read this out of the names, and worded it cautiously.

In Asia the page says it itself. All 66 collected entries have the same type label: "Glamping Site". Not a single other category occurs. At the same time, in eleven of the forty names stands the name of an entirely different accommodation type:

• four homestay (Vietnam and Indonesia)
• two hostel (Thailand, Indonesia)
• one villa, one suites, two house
• and one Rental Tenda, which literally means tent rental

So the label says something not about the type of accommodation but about which selection it got into. Anyone looking for glamping competitors on such a list will be counting hostels and homestays too.

On prices: the number exists, but it is not a price level

The displayed prices across the forty entries of the four countries range between 325 and 718,305 forints per night. That is a two-thousandfold difference within the same label.

Two things can be read from it cautiously:

Japan stands out, roughly fivefold. The Japanese median is five times higher than the other three, and two entries are above 200 thousand forints. So a premium glamping price level does exist there.

The lowest values, however, are probably not accommodation nights. The Indonesian 325 forints is the "Potentia Tent" entry, and the 805 forint one is "Rental Tenda Rahim". This is our reading from the names: a tent rental fee, not the price of a night. We cannot prove it, but 325 forints lies so far outside the rest that treating it as a standalone data point would be misleading.

And the most important limitation: these figures are prices displayed at the moment of one specific retrieval, for specific dates and room types. They are not average prices, not a seasonal price level, and not comparable with Hungarian prices, because the product behind them is not the same. The amount is displayed in forints, incidentally, because we retrieved the page from a machine in Hungary.

What can be taken from this

1. The first ten reviews are worth disproportionately much. The selections can be entered even with a small sample, and after that the list brings the traffic.
2. Never calculate market size or competitors from the list. Eleven of the forty are not even glamping in the usual sense of the word.
3. Do not use Asian prices as a reference point. The two-thousandfold spread is not a market fact but a sign that the category is not homogeneous.
4. Japan is the only one of the four where the premium price level shows in the data. If someone is looking for an international example of high priced glamping, that is where to look, not Southeast Asia.

Sources, and what CANNOT be claimed from them

• Booking.com national glamping selections: `booking.com/glamping/country/jp.en-gb.html`, and the pages of the same title for `th`, `id` and `vn`. Retrieved 2026-10-07.
• From all four pages we collected the data by machine processing, not from reading: 20 entries per page, 66 usable rows in total, 40 of them on the "ten best" lists. So the figures do not come from memory or from a summary.
• Of the four pages, three only yielded on a repeated attempt: the first requests were answered by an automated check window. We write this here because the repeatability of the measurement depends on it: a single failed retrieval does not mean the data is not there.

What these pages do NOT tell us: how many glamping accommodations there are in these countries, how big the market is, what the average price, occupancy or seasonality is. They are edited selections of ten items, not supply inventories.

And what cannot be claimed about the scores: the averages above 9 on these lists are not the market's averages but those of the places taken into the selection, in several cases from barely a handful of reviews. From this we infer neither a national standard nor a trend.