Phuket low season “abolished”
The weather cooperated with the meeting organisers, laying on a typical "low" season - er - summer season sunset.
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”.
Thirty years ago, when Phuket’s tourism industry was in its infancy, you could almost set your watch by the change in season. Jeroen Deknatel, who started one of Phuket’s first recreational diving companies in 1979, once explained, “During the rainy season there was no one here so you consumed the money you had saved from the high season. Then, on the first of November, I would fill up the tanks on the boat with literally the last of my money and hope and pray that the first divers would come along.” Usually they did.
The logo of the Phuket Summer Season campaign.
The island had six months of cloudless blue skies and millpond seas, followed by another six of blustery winds, tropical showers and surf. Many tourism businesses simply closed down for the latter half of the year, from May 1 to November 1, a period known as the “low season”.
Over the ensuing years, the island built up the low season business to the point where most hotels stay open year-round, but the “low season” image has stuck, and many businesses are simply treading water until the high season kicks in.
Thanks, most probably, to global climate change, the weather has changed. Tropical storms a mile wide can sweep in at any time from any direction, painting a wet stripe across the island in the middle of the “high” season. Equally, there can be days or even weeks of bright, sunny weather during the “wet” season.
But people out in the World still tend to think of Phuket as being beset by heavy rain for six months of the year. It is this perception that Nick Anthony, managing director of Indigo Real Estate hopes to change.
At the meeting, Anthony was, of course, preaching to the converted. Many people who live on Phuket prefer this time of the year, when the showers bring a lush green to the island and counter the unrelenting sun. They know, too, that the showers don’t last long and the weather is beautiful in between. But many tourists are still convinced that it rains 24/7 for six months. Weather websites tend to bolster this perception with logos of cloud and rain.
So how does Anthony hope to change things? As a start, a website has been created and Anthony made a plea for all in the tourism industry to help promote the idea, mainly through viral marketing on the Internet and by spreading the word through networks and to associates. Webcams will soon be set up at various points on the island and around Phang Nga Bay, to show that when it’s raining over Cape Panwa, it can be sunny in Patong or Phi Phi, or vice versa – and that the showers are often over in a matter of minutes.
The solution, he says, lies “partially in the presentation and dissemination of information, it’s partially through showing the truth, for example through the web cams, and its partially a matter of marketing the place for what it is and not for the perception as was.
“But it requires island support and government support. In this case it’s island support first, which many people may say is the cart pulling the horse, but … we expect, with island support, to get government support too.”
He is also convinced that the hotels, which compete fiercely with each other, will have to work together. “It’s an industry in crisis,” he said. A combination of the global economic crisis and Thailand’s political troubles, culminating in street fighting in Bangkok last month, has clobbered tourism. The effect of the swine flu scare has probably not yet kicked in. But it will.
“For the first time [the hotels] are on their knees and they are all going to have to look to something like this to pull them out of a distressing situation. The only way we can change perceptions to an ‘annualised’ Phuket is by getting everybody to support it. We’ll see.”
