The Strait of Hormuz closed on 4 March 2026 and Brent went up fifty-nine percent inside a month. Southeast Asia gets most of its crude through that gap. Here is what that actually does to the cost of riding here, and what it does not.
What happened, briefly
On 4 March 2026 the Strait of Hormuz was blockaded. Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil trade normally passes through that channel, and the overwhelming majority of what goes through it is bound for Asia rather than Europe or America.
Brent crude rose fifty-nine percent within a single month, past a hundred and fifteen dollars a barrel by late March, a steeper climb than the one that followed the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. A conditional ceasefire in April brought it back below a hundred, briefly, before it drifted up again with tankers still queueing. A memorandum in June, then renewed attacks on shipping in July, and the price has spent the summer hovering around the hundred mark.
None of that is a motorcycling story on the face of it. It becomes one when you look at where Southeast Asia buys its fuel.
Why this region is more exposed than most
Southeast Asian countries import somewhere around fifty-six percent of their crude from the Middle East, and something like eighty-four percent of the crude passing through Hormuz is heading for Asian refineries. This is not a region with an alternative supplier waiting.
Thailand has fifty-nine percent of its crude and a substantial share of its gas exposed to that route. Vietnam imports more than eighty percent of its crude from Kuwait alone, which is about as concentrated as an energy supply gets.
The responses across the region tell you how serious it got: emergency conservation measures, four-day working weeks in some places, fuel subsidies, and export bans on finished petroleum products. Thailand increased spot purchases of gas for power generation, expanded refinery throughput and restricted exports of refined fuel. Vietnam saw genuine shortages and panic buying at the pumps.
What it means at a pump in Chiang Mai
Here is the reassuring part, and it deserves to come before the caveats.
Fuel in Thailand is subsidised and price-managed, and the government has consistently intervened to smooth exactly this kind of shock rather than letting it pass straight through to the pump. Prices have risen. They have not risen fifty-nine percent, because the mechanism between the barrel and the pump is not a straight pipe.
For a rider, the practical effect on a Thai riding day is a modest increase in what it costs to fill a tank, on a machine that uses somewhere between four and six litres per hundred kilometres. Even a substantial percentage increase on a small base is a small absolute number.
The bigger effects are indirect and they show up somewhere other than the fuel bill.
Where it actually shows up: the support vehicle
The vehicle burning the fuel on a guided tour is not the motorcycle. It is the van.
A support vehicle carrying twelve people’s luggage, spare tyres, tools, water and jerrycans, over the same route, uses several times what a bike does. On a thirty-day multi-country route that is a serious line item, and it is the one that moves when diesel moves.
The same is true of the transfers, the airport runs and the occasional truck hired to reposition machines. Operators feel a fuel shock through their logistics rather than through their fleet.
And in the airfare, which is the big one
The largest single fuel-related cost in anybody’s motorcycle tour is not on the ground at all. It is the flight to get here.
Jet fuel tracks crude closely and airlines pass it through faster than any other part of the travel chain, via fuel surcharges that appear as a separate line or get folded into the fare. A rider flying from Europe or North America to Bangkok in a period of hundred-dollar oil is paying materially more for that flight than they were eighteen months ago, and that increase dwarfs anything happening at a Thai fuel pump.
Which is worth saying plainly to anybody weighing up a trip: the fuel crisis affects the cost of getting to Asia far more than it affects the cost of riding around it once you are here.
Availability, which matters more than price
For a rider, running out is a worse problem than paying more, and this is where the picture varies sharply by country.
Thailand has managed supply well. Stations have been stocked, there has been no meaningful disruption to a touring itinerary, and the network is dense enough that range anxiety is not a thing on any of the standard routes.
Vietnam had genuine shortages and panic buying at the height of it. That has eased, and it demonstrates how quickly a country importing eighty percent of its crude from one supplier can find itself queueing.
Laos and Cambodia sit downstream of both, with thinner distribution networks and further to go if a tanker is late. Rural Laos in particular has always had a fragile fuel supply and a shock upstream makes that worse.
Myanmar is the acute case. Fuel prices there have surged hardest in the remote and conflict-affected areas, vehicles queue for hours, domestic flights have been grounded and some businesses have simply suspended operations. That is a country where the fuel situation alone would give an operator pause.
Mongolia, where the nearest pump can be two hundred kilometres away at the best of times, is a place where supply reliability matters more than price and where a support vehicle carrying jerrycans stops being a luxury.
What an all-inclusive price does about it
This is the structural question and it is worth understanding as a customer.
A fully inclusive tour price includes the fuel. That means the operator is carrying the fuel price risk between the day you book and the day you ride, which on a departure booked eighteen months ahead is a real exposure.
Some operators handle that with a fuel surcharge clause that lets them add a supplement if costs move beyond a threshold. Some absorb it. Some quietly reprice future departures and honour the ones already sold.
The thing to check before you pay a deposit is which of those your operator does, and it is a fair question to ask directly. Our position is that the price on the page is the price: fully inclusive, no hidden costs, no surcharges added afterwards. That is easy to say in a stable market and it is worth more in one like this.
The comparison that flatters motorcycles
There is an argument that gets made badly by the industry and which is actually true, so it is worth making properly.
A motorcycle uses roughly a third of what a car uses over the same distance, and a small fraction of what a coach tour’s vehicle uses per passenger-kilometre when the coach is half empty. In a period of expensive fuel, two-wheeled travel gets relatively cheaper compared with every alternative except the train.
That does not make a motorcycle tour a frugal choice, because the cost is in the accommodation, the guiding and the logistics rather than in the petrol. But it does mean that of all the ways to see a country, this is one of the least exposed to what a barrel costs.
What we have actually changed
Honesty is better than reassurance here, so specifically: the routes have not changed, the departures have not changed, and no fuel surcharge has been applied to anybody’s booking.
What has changed is the planning margin. Fuel stops on the thinner routes are treated with more caution, the jerrycan capacity in the support vehicle on the remote routes has gone up, and on the Laos and Cambodia legs the rule of filling at every opportunity above half a tank is enforced rather than suggested.
That is the sort of adjustment that is invisible when it works, which is the point.
How to think about booking in an unstable market
Three practical observations for anybody weighing a trip.
Book the flight sooner rather than later if the price looks reasonable, because airline fuel surcharges move faster and further than anything on the ground. The airfare is where volatility lives.
Prefer an operator whose price is genuinely all-inclusive with no surcharge clause, and read the terms rather than the headline. In a stable market the difference is theoretical. In this one it is not.
And do not defer a trip on the assumption that oil will be cheaper next year. It might be. It might also be considerably more expensive, and the thing that has actually gone up in the meantime is the airfare and the hotel rates rather than the petrol.
The wider fragility this exposed
Worth a paragraph because it is the real lesson and it outlasts this particular crisis.
What March demonstrated is that a region importing more than half its energy through a single channel has almost no buffer. The measures that followed, four-day weeks, export bans, emergency spot purchases, are the actions of governments discovering they had less slack than they thought.
The medium-term consequence has been a sharp acceleration in renewable investment across the region, which is a good outcome arrived at by a bad route. Thailand and Vietnam had both been moving that way slowly; a hundred-dollar barrel moved them considerably faster.
For a traveller, the useful takeaway is that this is a region where energy supply is a live political subject rather than a background utility, and where a disruption several thousand kilometres away turns up at a rural fuel pump within weeks.
Riding season versus the news cycle
A note on proportion, because it is easy to read all of the above and conclude the region is in crisis.
It is not. Fuel stations in Thailand are open, stocked and busy. The tourist economy is functioning normally. The roads that make northern Thailand, northern Vietnam and Laos worth riding are exactly as they were, and the price of a tank of petrol is not the thing that will shape your fortnight.
Weather will shape it. The burning season in the north will shape it. The state of a border crossing will shape it. Those are the variables worth planning around, and the fuel question is a long way down that list for anybody riding in Thailand.
Where fuel quality matters more than fuel price
A related point that riders should care about more than they do.
Octane availability varies across the region. Thailand offers a good range including high-octane options at most stations. Laos, Cambodia and rural Myanmar are patchier, and what is sold as premium may not be. Mongolia’s remote pumps sell fuel that is both low-octane and frequently dirty enough that a filtered funnel is standard equipment.
A modern fuel-injected engine adapts to lower octane by retarding ignition, which costs power and is otherwise harmless. Dirty fuel is the real problem, and it is why a spare fuel filter belongs in the support vehicle on any route that leaves the main network.
None of that has changed because of the oil price. It is simply the aspect of fuel that actually affects your riding day.
The electric question, since somebody always asks
An expensive barrel raises the obvious follow-up: does any of this make electric touring viable here yet?
Not for this kind of riding. Charging infrastructure in Thailand is developing fast in the cities and along the main highways, and is essentially absent on the mountain roads that constitute the reason to come. A three-hundred-kilometre day through Mae Hong Son with no charger and a two-hour recharge at the far end is not a touring proposition.
Urban and short-loop electric riding in Chiang Mai is happening and will keep growing. Multi-day mountain touring on the current generation of machines is not there, and pretending otherwise would waste somebody’s holiday.
What actually determines the price of your trip
To put the fuel question in its place, here is roughly where the money goes on a fully inclusive tour.
Accommodation is the largest single component on most routes. Then the guiding team, which on a proper trip is a road captain, a tour guide, a mechanic and a driver, all of whom are paid for every day of the departure. Then the motorcycles themselves, which are capital sitting in a workshop being maintained. Then meals. Then fuel, well down the list. Then the permits and paperwork, which on Bhutan and Tibet are enormous and everywhere else are minor.
A twenty percent movement in the fuel line changes the total by a rounding error. A twenty percent movement in hotel rates changes it materially. Which is why fuel shocks make headlines and hotel inflation quietly does the damage.
What it did to the motorcycle industry itself
A second-order effect worth noticing, because it will outlast the price spike.
Southeast Asia is the largest motorcycle market on earth by volume, and the overwhelming majority of those machines are small commuter bikes bought by people for whom fuel is a meaningful share of household spending. A sustained fuel price rise in this region does not change what wealthy tourists ride. It changes what fifty million commuters buy.
The visible consequence has been an acceleration in electric two-wheeler adoption in the cities, particularly in Vietnam, where the domestic manufacturers have been pushing hard and where urban charging is a solvable problem. Ride through Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City now and the proportion of silent scooters in the traffic is noticeably higher than it was two years ago.
That has almost no bearing on a touring motorbike tour through the mountains, where the range and charging problems remain unsolved. It has a great deal of bearing on what the traffic around you looks like, and on where the industry’s attention is going.
The last time this happened
Perspective, since oil shocks are not new and the pattern is familiar.
The 2008 spike took Brent to nearly a hundred and fifty dollars and produced very similar headlines. Fuel surcharges appeared on airline tickets, tour operators added supplements, and a lot of people deferred trips. Within eighteen months the price had collapsed to a third of the peak.
The 2022 disruption following the invasion of Ukraine did the same thing on a smaller scale, with the same regional pattern: Asia exposed through import dependence, governments intervening at the pump, and the effect showing up in airfares more than in local costs.
Neither of those permanently changed the cost of riding in Asia. What they did change, each time, was airline pricing for a season or two and the amount of attention paid to energy security afterwards.
The reasonable expectation is that this one behaves similarly, which is an argument neither for panic nor for waiting.
The honest summary
The Hormuz closure was a genuine economic event with real consequences across Southeast Asia, and it hit the countries in this region harder than it hit Europe because of where they buy their oil.
For somebody riding here, it has mattered most in three places: the price of the flight to get here, the availability of fuel in the thinner countries, and the operating costs of the vehicles supporting a tour. It has mattered least where people expect it to, which is the pump price of a tank of petrol for a motorcycle.
The riding is unaffected. The roads do not know what a barrel costs.
Riding Asia for real
Our prices are fully inclusive with no hidden costs and no fuel surcharges added after booking, which in a market like this one is a position worth stating rather than assuming. The fuel, the bikes, the hotels, the meals, the road captain, the tour guide, the mechanic and the support vehicle are all in the number on the page.
For a first big biking tour the ten-day Amazing Thailand is the straightforward one and Thailand is the country in the region least affected by any of the above. The twenty-day Great Thailand Ride is the long version. The full range is here, and if you want to know what is and is not included on a specific guided tour before you commit, message us on WhatsApp and we will send you the itemised answer.
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