Northern or Southern Roundtrip Phuket Sailing?

I'm trying to decide between the Northern or Southern round trip sailings from Phuket on the Clipper, so I can use some help! Also, has anyone stayed in the hotels the Clipper has for Bangkok or Phuket? :confused:

Thanks!

We will be doing the cruise that takes us to Penang, Malaysia on 1/17. I had never seen any offer of Hotels by the cruise line. However on the board here or in trip advisor I saw mentioned that the line used the Patong Holiday Inn as a gathering point before embarkation. Personally we booked our own air via Cathay Pacific website back in August, whoops make that May, from New York City, via Hong Kong to Phuket for less than $1100 RT per person. We will overnight each direction in Hong Kong and we will spend more than 10 days in Phuket. If you decide to do hotels & air on your own check costs on Kayak.com for air. You can work multiple stop itinerary as for hotels use either asiarooms.com or orbitz. A nice hotel in Bangkok run $80/100 in phuket $120/140. Yes you can spend a lot more but these prices will get you good,clean comfortable accommodations. Good to see some other American is looking at these Asia cruises.

We will be on the Nov. 22 sailing, southbound. We also are flying in Cathay to Phuket, arriving the same day as the cruise since the ship doesn't sail until 10:00pm. I just hope we don't miss the Hong Kong-Phuket flight as CX only has one a day, and the Vancouver-Hong Kong flight 889 we are on is chronically late. After the cruise we are flying to Cambodia for a week of touring on our own in Phnom Penh. Glad to see the dollar stengthening as onboard charges are in Euros so we will have a small savings over what I was expecting.