Robinson Crusoe Country: Khao Lak

The expansion into Khao Lak in Phang Nga, north of Phuket, by Phuket resort developers continues with the Kata Group announcing plans for a B1.2 billion resort–the Khaolak Cassaway Resort and Spa–to be built in this growing area for destinational resorts.

The four star resort will be the fifth such hotel under the Kata Group brand and is a joint venture with backing from the K Bank.

The other four star resorts in the Kata Group are Phuket Orchid Resort, Kata Beach Resort, Karon Beach Resort and Kandaburi Samui Resort.

The new development should open in November this year, in time for the high season.

It joins a growing list of new developments at Khao Lak, which still has considerably more room than Phuket. Khao Lak has more than 50 hotels of various descriptions.

According to the locally produced Takola Magazine, which reports on events and property developments in Khao Lak, property development in the area has “really picked up.”  Most of the developments are low scale.

Takola Magazine extols the benefits of investing in Khao Lak because of the abundant space, compared to Phuket.  It also has many attractive, relatively unspoiled, beaches such as Thai Maung, Bangnieng, Khaolak and Bangsak Beaches.

The area is much quieter than Phuket and charter boats leave daily for great scuba diving and snorkeling spots such as the Similan and Surin Islands. The three hour boat trip is worth the wait for the crystal clear waters and teeming marine life.

Khaolak Cassaway Resort – New Development by Kata Group is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

The 419-room Sheraton Grande, one of the longest established five-star hotels on Phuket, will close from 1 July, 2011 for B500 million worth of extensive renovations and refurbishment covering all rooms and public areas and re-open as Angsana Laguna Phuket on 1 December, 2011.

The opening of an Angsana on Phuket will fill a long held desire by Banyan Tree to have an Angsana branded hotel under its group on the island. It consolidates Banyan Tree’s Phuket property as the flagship of a company continuing to expand in Asia, particularly in China.

Angsana's Morocco Hotel has won numerous awards.

Angsana Hotels & Resorts operates more than 10 resorts and hotels, over 40 spas and retail galleries. It is a member of the The Leading Small Hotels of the World and The Leading Hotels of the World. The group has won numerous awards, including the Conde Nast Traveler USA Hot List 2008 for its Angsana Riads Collection in Morocco.

The Sheraton Grande Laguna Phuket was also on Conde Nast’s Traveler Readers’ Choice top 10 resorts in 2007. It is a member of The Luxury Collection, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide. It commands a large Bang Tao Bay beachfront location close to Laguna Phuket Golf Club.

Banyan Tree’s Laguna Phuket property is the flagship of the Singapore based company which in 2010 had more than 26 resorts and hotels, 65 spas, 70 retail galleries and three golf courses under its management or ownership. In Phuket its Angsana spas and galleriesd are already well established within the Laguna Phuket resort area.

Banyan Tree was founded by Ho KwonPing, executive chairman, and has expanded rapidly beyond its Phuket base. It has plans for eight new developments in China between 2011 and 2013 and others in Macau, Indonesia, Vietnam, Portugal, Greece, Morroco and Oman in the same period..

Laguna Sheraton to Become Angsana Laguna Phuket is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

Computer generated image of The Yamu, as envisaged before the arrival of the global financial crisis. The final result may look very different.

Construction has resumed on The Yamu, the five-star-plus resort on the east coast of Phuket, which was stalled by the Global Financial Crisis, after developers Campbell Kane (CK) found a new backer, Singapore’s Hotel Properties Ltd (HPL).

HPL is controlled by Ong Beng Seng, and already has Four Seasons and Hard Rock Hotels in Asia in its portfolio. Ong also owns the rights to the Singapore Grand Prix and the city-state’s first Ferrari dealership.

Originally, the hotel was to have been run by Adrian Zecha’s GHM (Zecha is the man behind Aman Resorts), but CK and GHM parted ways about a year ago. It has now been announced that a management agreement has been signed with Como Hotels and Resorts, also based in Singapore, which already runs high-end resorts and hotels in London, Bangkok, Bali, Bhutan, the Maldives and the Turks & Caicos Islands.

The hotel, which will be known as The Yamu by Como, is now set to open in September next year.

‘”The addition of this Phuket property is aligned with Como Hotels and Resorts’ expansion plans within the region, supporting our growth strategy to include key destinations within the Como portfolio,” says Harry Apostolides, Vice President of Business Development, Como Hotels and Resorts.

Original design by Philippe Starck for a room at The Yamu. Whether Starck will come back on board under the new ownership is "not yet decided".

“This new Como resort will be our second Thai property, after the Metropolitan in Bangkok. These two properties will, in concert, showcase both the vibrancy and serenity of Thailand. Phuket is one of the top tourist destinations in the region, and we have focused on its east coast— an area of outstanding natural beauty and great biodiversity.”

Peter Hamilton, Managing Director of Campbell Kane, added, “We are pleased to be working with Como Hotels and Resorts on this venture. Como’s range of properties and the experiences they offer continue to redefine luxury travel.”

The hotel may end up looking very different from the original concept. For example, the original plan included an exclusive hotel within the hotel, the Club Villas, with its own dedicated hotel facilities. Hamilton told the Observer that there will be pool villas, but whether they will be run as a separate enclave is “not yet decided”.

Also not yet decided is whether the property will have a state-of-the-art recording studio, as was originally planned.

The earlier concept also included gorgeous design by Philippe Starck, probably the world’s best-known designer. Whether he will be involved now, Hamilton said, is also “not yet decided”.

One facility that has survived the ups and downs, however, is the 100-metre pool, hanging in thin air at one end.

Singapore’s Como to run Yamu hotel on Phuket’s east coast is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

Jao Por Shanghai, aka Suthikiati Chirathivat.

The Chairman of Central Plaza Hotels Suthikiati Chirathivat – who’s also a director of Central Pattana, which owns Central Festival Phuket among other things – came to Phuket at the weekend with a couple of dozen Bangkok journalists to check out his latest creation, the 262-room 2.3-billion-baht Centara Grand Beach Resort on Karon Beach.

Dressed in an embroidered high-neck Chinese jacket topped off with a black homberg, the 67-year-old tycoon clowned around for photographers, striking Big Boss Shanghai poses with a midnight black pistol, something he apparently does at the drop of a hat. It only took one shooter to call, “Where’s your gun?” and he went into action.

But then this is a man who’s used to the limelight – he was once married to 1960s mega celebrity Apasara Hongsakula, the first Thai to win the Miss Universe crown.

He can afford to clown around. He was recently ranked by Forbes magazine as the 37th richest man in Thailand, with an estimated wealth of US$140 million. Impressive until you realise that other family members ranked 13, 25 and 36 in the list, giving the family as a whole a total of 770 million moolas.

Apart from the resorts and hotels and the Central malls, the family controls such brands as Robinson, Tops, Power Buy, Super Sport, B2S, HomeWorks and Office Depot. It also holds the Thailand franchises for Office Depot, Watson’s and Mark & Spencer. It also has a large chunk of Big C. And of course, it owns CentralWorld, notoriously torched earlier this year, allegedly by Red Shirt arsonists, and recently part-reopened.

And the companies the family controls are making money so fast it’s almost as if they have trouble putting it all to work. Dr Ronnachit Mahattanapreut, the hotel company’s senior VP for finance and admin, said the Karon resort was funded “mostly from internal capital. We did get a bank credit line of 1.6 billion baht,” he added with a smile, “but we ended up using only 10 million of that.”

The resort's architecture echoes old Phuket Town's Sino-Portuguese style.

Did they have any worries about sinking so much of the company’s money into a venture, especially when, soon after they did so, the entire world economy disappeared into a sinkhole? No, said Ronnachit. “We were convinced that the Thai economy has come through so many ups and downs and has always come out on top.”

In the pink: view from one of the resort's pool suites.

The resort, which welcomed its first guests just two weeks ago, is booked solid for Christmas/New Year and is predicted by its owners to finish next year with an average 60 percent occupancy. At an average of B7,400 per room night, that would bring in revenue of more than B400 million, so the investment’s looking pretty solid.

The resort sprawls across 40 rai of absolute beachfront land – the only one in Karon to do so – and takes its design from the Sino-Portuguese and Sino-Colonial architecture of old Phuket Town. It’s bright pink, which has apparently won local hearts and has had tour agents clamouring to represent the property.

Guests enjoy the lazy river that winds through the resort.

Suthikiati and family trace their roots back to the Chinese tropical island of Hainan. Are there any plans to have a resort there? “One day, maybe,” Suthikiati told the Observer.

Meanwhile, the resort has already become involved with the local community, signing on as a sponsor of the Phuket King’s Cup Regatta, which starts next Saturday (December 4).

Factoid: Forbes ranks the three richest men in Thailand as, respectively, the founder of Red Bull; the boss of ThaiBev, which makes Chang Beer; and the boss of CP, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of chicken and animal feed. Wonder if one can draw any conclusions about Thailand from that?

Big Boss visits Centara Grand Phuket is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

The Indigo Pearl's design theme revolves around Phuket's now defunct tin mining era, but the management are determined to be rather more eco-sensitive than the tin miners.

The five-star Indigo Pearl Resort at Nai Yang Beach has launched its first “eco-tour” package, inviting guests to “give back to the community” during their vacation.

The launch weekend of the new package coincides with World Coastal Clean Up Day, taking place in Phuket for the first time at Nai Yang beach on September 25. The inaugural package is for September 24 to 26.

As well as halping to clean up the beach, guests will join a kayak tour of nearby mangrove forests, and visit a hydroponic farm, rubber and palm plantations and a mushroom farm.  An afternoon will also be spent visiting a local Thai community to learn about their sustainable livelihoods.

The eco-adventure is priced at B21,900 with accommodation in a Pearl Bed Suite with complimentary extras including a la carte dinner for two with cocktails at either of the two restaurants at Indigo Pearl, one-hour foot massage for twoand a 50% discount on an in-room spa milky bath as well as the Eco Tour.

Following the launch, the promotion will continue until October 31 for stays of at least three nights.

Upgrades to higher room categories are available at B2,000 for a private pool pavilion and B12,000 for a luxury suite.

Phuket resort aims at eco-conscious visitors is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

And you don't have to clean the ring off the bath afterwards... Deluxe bathroom at the JW Marriott on Mai Khao Beach.

When it begins to pour with rain in Phuket and then sunbirds fly back to their homes in the west or north, hoteliers’ hopes turn fondly to those of us who live here. “How about a weekend away from the housework?” they ask. “Or how about a special deal at our restaurants?”

It makes sense. After all, they have some empty rooms or restaurant seats, and staff with time on their hands.

In this vein, Marriott Hotels Thailand are offering a special “Thai Resident Rate” for those who book in advance at any Marriott hotel or resort in the country:  35 percent off the best available rate for any time between now and December 31st (which is well into the high season.

For reservations call +66 (0) 2656 7707 and ask for the ‘Thai Resident Rate’. The rate is subject to the usual service charge and taxes. Guests need to present a valid Thai ID card or passport showing that they live in Thailand at check-in, in order to qualify.

In Phuket, the offer applies to the JW Marriott on Mai Khao Beach, and the three Courtyard by Marriott hotels at Surin Beach, in Patong and in Kamala.

For those who don’t live in Thailand, there’s another deal from Marriott, valid for stays at the three Courtyard properties until October 31 this year.

The package is for a minimum two-night stay, with rates starting at B3,499 a night in Patong, B3,299 at Surin Beach and B3,199 in Kamala.

All packages include accommodation in a Deluxe room with breakfast for two. Guests are also entitled to a 20% discount on spa treatments and a food and beverage voucher for B500.

Cheers.

Marriott offers special ‘resident rate’ in Thailand is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

Phuket ranked third as a holiday destination, dropping from second place last year. Bali, which came first last year, also dropped a place, while Kerala in India, which was in third last year, leapt into the lead.

Amanpuri remained No 1 in the Leisure Hotels & Resorts section of the poll.

Phuket scored well, however, in the Leisure Hotels & Resorts section of the poll, with Amanpuri maintaining its position at the top of the tree. Twin Palms came 9th (11th last year), the Banyan Tree was 12th (20), the JW Marriott on its heels in 13th place (16), while the Sheraton and Sala Phuket were new entries in 17th and 24th places respectively.

Banyan Tree was Phuket’s finest in the Spa Hotels & Resorts section, maintaining its second place. Amanpuri slid up one place, from 5th to 4th, while Marriott jumped three places to come 6th.

Two Phuket hotels also featured in the Conference Hotels section of the poll. Sheraton was 10th, down one place from last year, while the JW Marriott was a new entry in  20th place.

Smart Travel Asia does not give raw numbers of the people who took part in the poll, but notes, “Approximately 60 percent were based in Asia (largely Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, India, China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and the Middle East), 20 percent in UK/Europe and 20 percent in USA and North America.”

It also gathered other information in the poll. One interesting set of stats: “As many as 91 percent of the voters said they drew their primary image of brands from the Internet and 85 percent said they made travel decisions online. However, just 38 percent said they book online.”

The full poll results can be seen here.

Phuket scores high in Smart Travel Asia poll is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

The design of the new Centara echoes the Sino-Portuguese architecture of old Phuket Town.

Centara Hotels & Resorts will open its new Centara Grand Beach Resort Phuket  at Karon Beach in October this year, its fourth hotel in Phuket.

The resort will have 262 guestrooms and villas, divided between 108 deluxe rooms, 81 deluxe spa rooms, 45 pool premium rooms, 18 pool suites, six one-bed pool villas and four two-bed pool villas, along with four F&B outlets: the all-day restaurant, The Cove; the Mare Italian restaurant and bar; the Luna Chill-Out Bar and Lounge; and a Beachcomber Beach Bar.

Other facilities at the resort, the design of which references Phuket Sino-Portuguese architecture, will include a tennis court, fitness centre, a spa, a playground and two playrooms for children, one for ages 4-10 and another for ages 10-16.

Centara is part of the family-owned Thai giant Central Group, which also owns the Central Department stores (including Central Festival in Phuket and the ill-fated Central World in Bangkok, destroyed by arson in the wake of the recent Red Shirt violence); Robinson department stores; B2S bookstores; electronics retail chain PowerBuy; DIY chain Homeworks and sporting goods store chain Supersports; and a minority stake in Big C supermarkets; .

It also operates the Thailand franchises of brands such as Hong Kong drugstore chain Watson and UK retailer Marks & Spencer.

Centara set to open fourth resort in Phuket is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

Michael Ma - "I’ve been green for 30 years."

Michael Ma’s getting pretty fit these days. It’s all that climbing up and down steps at his latest acquisition, the hillside Indochine Resort in Phuket, formerly the troubled Villa Santi property development.

The Phuket resort is a new departure for Ma’s company, the Indochine Group. It’s the group’s first venture in Thailand, and its first resort – all the other Indochine properties so far have been bars, restaurants and night clubs.

Is it hard running a resort? Not really, he says. After all, in the rooms and villas, people serve their own drinks. All the resort managers he has spoken to agreed that the food and beverage aspect is the hardest – and F&B is something Indochine knows inside and out, and on a large scale.

Each of its major outlets – five complexes in Singapore, two each in KL and Hamburg and one in Jakarta, which Dubai next on the list – can hold up to 2,000 people, and the ones in Singapore have catered to events for the International Union of Conservation for Nature, the IMF and the World Bank, along with after-event parties for the MTV Asia awards and the International Indian Film Academy Awards.

It also hosted the International Olympic 2012 Bid parties of London, New York, and Paris – all at the same time in different venues.

Apart from the big parties, individual guests have included Henry Kissinger, Michael Bloomberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair and his wife, Mrs. Cherie Blair, and Prince Albert of Monaco. None of these people would tolerate shoddy F&B for long.

The hardest thing about Indochine Phuket, he says, has been getting it finished. The contractor’s six months behind schedule. “This is the hardest it’s ever been,” he says. “Even in Jakarta and Delhi things went much faster than this. That’s why I need to be here right now.” But he perseveres, stumping up and down the steps to deliver instructions in Thai, Lao or English, depending on who needs chivvying along.

Ma’s Indochine Group quietly bought Villa Santi a couple of years ago. He loves the site of the resort, climbing up a hill at the north end of Patong Bay, giving it a panorama that delights Ma night and day. All his existing bars, restaurants and nightclubs – in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and Germany – have great views, he explains, but Indochine Phuket is the only one with a 24/7 panorama.

Daytime panorama from Indochine. At night there are the bright lights of Patong, hot air balloons and, often fireworks.

The view is an essential part of Ma’s outlook on business, his approach to tackling new projects. He explains, “I like to see the end-game first. Then I work backwards. I see the picture and I know the ending of the story. I’m a film producer and director.

“I love food, wine, partying. I’ve been doing that since I was about 14-15 years old. Then I got into art and design, so it’s an eclectic mixture of my experience. When I was a commodity trader I went to the best bars and restaurants all over the world – and you see the difference. I know exactly what I want.

“Every day, at the end of the party, there’s romance. Every day there’s drama. It’s an Oscar-winning story. So you just take that story and elongate it to eight hours a day or, in the case of the resort, 24 hours a day.”
Ma’s definitely got a sybaritic side to him – he counts beautiful people and glitterati such as Sting, David and Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham, INXS, Gong Li and Mariah Carey among his acquaintances.

But apart from that and his palpable business acumen, he is also very serious about the environment and takes his social responsibilities as a given.

These attitudes are not PR BS. Many resorts – indeed, many corporations, even property developers – tout themselves as “green”. But few can claim among their friends Dr Ashok Khosla, President of the IUCN, the umbrella for hundreds of green activist groups, including the WWWF and Greenpeace. The IUCN is the only environmental organisation to have observer status at the UN. Ma is its Singapore representative.

In an interview, he launches immediately into an explanation of how he is striving to make Indochine Phuket as green as possible.

“It’s not that we ‘want’ to be green – I’ve been green for 30 years. We don’t do shark fin soup, bluefin tuna, yellow tuna, or sturgeon. We’ve been doing this for 11 years in Singapore and everywhere else.

“Everything that we’ve built new [at Indochine Phuket has environmental considerations in mind]. There’s double insulation, there’s LED lighting, there’s a heat exchange system going in so that whenever we turn on the aircon we get free hot water.

“Our investment level is higher but the aim is to reduce power consumption. We’re looking at composting. Anything non-dairy, non-protein will be separated for local pig farms. Any plant trimmings will be turned into fertiliser.

“Our ‘timber’ decking is 50% recycled plastic, 50% rice hull. All the plastic chairs you see are recycled plastic with UV inhibitor so they’re built to be light and last for years. That’s the sort of spec we’re going for.”

Whenever possible, locally-sourced materials are used, not just because they may be cheaper, but because transporting them produces less CO2 than if they were brought, say, from Bangkok.

Similarly, for many companies, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is something they feel they must do in order to show they are good corporate citizens – with a helpful PR spinoff.

Ma, however, was taking his social responsibilities seriously long before he went into business. In Australia, where he grew up after his family fled the arrival of the communist regime in his native Laos, he acted, when he was just 16 or 17, as an interpreter between the Indochinese community (many of whom could speak little or no English) and the authorities and NGOs.

Through interpreting, Ma met the Mayor of Sydney and other politicians, and soon graduated into an advocacy role. He was urged to go into politics and joined the more conservative of the two main political parties, the Liberals. This was not, he explained, because he had political ambitions, o because his views are right wing – far from it – but because someone pointed out that the Liberals had no members with Southeast Asian backgrounds.

“I joined so that I could maybe counterbalance some of the people on the extreme right – the Pauline Hansons and so on.” In 1990 he was voted Young Liberal of the Year.

Twenty years on, and he is still involved in supporting the community, locally and in a much wider way. In Singapore, he says, he is on the board of such entities as Action for Community Enterprise, and is a consultant with the National Environment Agency and the Urban Redevelopment Authority.

Naturally, the company is involved. In the recent past, Indochine has organised events supporting tsunami relief, aid to children with HIV and heart research. This is in addition to its Green Festival, aimed at raising awareness of the issues before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change.

All of these has a strong fun element, reflecting Ma’s own philosophy of life. He’s not going to go as far as giving up his good food, wine and partying to go live in a cave in order to save the environment. And he’s not going to give up his stretch limo. “People ask me how I can be green and have a stretch limo. I tell them it can carry eight people with the same engine as the four-seat version,” he grins.

Bright green lights for Indochine Phuket’s Michael Ma is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.

Dewa Resort, at Nai Yang Beach, is the latest to sign up LaTour for its management expertise.

LaTour Hotels & Resorts of San Diego, California, which recently signed up to manage the Indochine Resort in Kalim,  has signed up its second property in Phuket: The Dewa at Nai Yang.

In a public statement, Phuket landmark Lars Ydmark, the boss of Tri-Asia, which developed and owns the hotel, explained, “We’re excited to put Dewa Phuket Resort into LaTour Hotels & Resorts’ group of managed properties and welcome their team’s expertise and guidance in providing premier services.

“By introducing Latour, we will only enhance further what we have already achieved and thereby add more value for all our individual home owners at Dewa Phuket. As the saying goes, more tools in the tool box.”

LaTour is a new name in the hotel business, founded just a couple of years ago, and with just nine properties in its portfolio – four in the US, three in Mexico and, now, two in Thailand.

However, it does have a great deal of experience in it’s senior management team. Founder, chairman and CEO Thomas LaTour was for many years the boss of Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, growing it from one hotel to 45 during his tenure. He is also a big wheel in ResortCom International.

In fact, most of the top management of LaTour and ResortCom are the same people.

In case you were wondering, ResortCom International – despite the coincidence of names – is not affiliated to timeshare exchange giant RCI, though John Small, chairman of ResortCom and vice-chairman of LaTour, once worked for RCI Management – an RCI subsidiary which manages timeshare properties, but doesn’t sell timeshare. And ResortCom also boats that it “can provide a fully integrated platform and 100% of the operational and back office services for a timeshare or fractional resort developer” Clear?

Be that as it may, Ydmark says that there will be no timeshare at Dewa, which is part-resort, part-privately owned apartments. “LaTour is a manager of high-end mixed-use boutique resorts so that fits perfectly with what we have. That’s why we’re delighted to get in bed with them,” he said.

LaTour Hotels & Resorts to manage Dewa Phuket is an article from: Phuket Observer - Phuket lifestyle magazine.