Phuket fares poorly in Travel+Leisure awards
Here's T+L. But where's Phuket?
Here’s an oddity: despite the politically-inspired Red Shirt violence in the Thai capital just a couple of months ago, Bangkok is, according to a poll of readers of Travel+Leisure magazine, the best city in the world.
Second-best in the world is Chiang Mai, home of fugutive ex-premier and alleged Red Shirt funder Thaksin Shinawatra.
Yet Phuket – no riots, no fuss, almost no Red Shirts – doesn’t even make it into the Top 10 Islands list in the same poll. (Two competitors, Bali and the Maldives, come 4th and 10th respectively.)
Three Phuket resorts do get into the Top 500. They are Le Meridien, Amanpuri and the JW Marriott Phuket Resort & Spa (in that order). But none of these scores sufficient votes to make it into the Top 50 worldwide.
Plainly, some of the placings in the list are the result of current events. For example, 11 of the Top 50 resorts in this year’s T+L poll – including the global No 1 - are in South Africa, and another eight are in nearby countries such as Botswana, Tanzania and Kenya. That wouldn’t have anything to do with the World Cup, would it?
But the results do raise concerns for Phuket. The island trumpets its successes in other polls, particularly the Condé Nast Traveler magazine awards. But where Traveler sells 800,000 copies a month, T+L clocks up 950,000 copies (source).
T+L is still the Big One. Phuket’s travel industry needs to figure out how to make a bigger impression with the magazine’s readers and editors.
