Budget airlines seem to have spotted something that surprisingly few others have: that holidays in Phuket are really cheap at the moment.

Sala Resorts comes up with a new twist – free flights for guests between Phuket and Koh Samui.

A couple of hundred hoteliers and senior figures in the island’s tourism industry gathered at The Chedi hotel last night (April 29) to hear a plan to officially abolish the tourism “low season”, replacing it with “Phuket Summer Season”.

Mom Tris’ Boathouse hotel has long been a centre for literature in Phuket, starting more than a decade ago with its Chao Phraya Literary Club.

Okay, so far no Pulitzer or Booker winners have appeared at the hotel’s regular literary evenings, but the evenings do feature a variety of Thailand-based novelists, columnists, poets, editors and assorted scribblers, and attract a good crowd of people who have realised there is life outside Patong.

Most people will have heard of Google Street View by now, with its camera cars clicking their way down streets in the States and the UK, and its special face-blurring software, turning whole populations into Play-Doh people.

Google Street View doesn’t cover Phuket, and its probably going to be a while until it does. But someone else is already here. It’s called MapJack.

You would think that with all the gorgeous scenery around Phuket, air charter services would be a no-brainer. But the record is, shall we say, spotty, particularly when it comes to fixed-wing aircraft.

Way back in history (okay, about 15 years ago) a float plane service called Yellow Bird ran joyrides from Patong. It didn’t have any of the right paperwork, so it disappeared almost as soon as it landed.

Singapore based Tiger Airways will increase the number of flights between Singapore and Bangkok to three daily and Singapore and Phuket to two daily from 26 October. With the additional 28 flights per week, Tiger Airways will offer a total of 70 flights between Thailand and Singapore. Rosalynn Tay, Managing Director of Tiger Airways Singapore [...]

Hong Kong Express Airways is expanding its route network across Asia with the addition of four new popular destinations, all launching in September of 2008. The airline is adding Osaka, Japan; Phuket, Thailand; Denpasar, Indonesia and Manila, Philippines to its route network: in time for holiday-makers to take advantage of the new routes for the [...]