Phuket tourism rising above global worries

by Charlotte Ashton Phuket

Constantly rising oil prices have been taking their toll on the travel and tourism industry, especially with airlines raising prices or cutting flights and routes – or both. As a result, the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) recently announced a downward revision of its predictions of tourist figures for 2009.

 
This is not to say that the TAT expects the number of tourists visiting the ‘Land of Smiles’ to fall compared with 2007. No, what it means is that the number will not go up by quite as much as originally expected.
 
In fact, even the revised “low” figure of 3.3% growth would be the envy of most other established tourist destinations, and for 2009 the TAT is still targeting a 5% growth in revenue from tourism.
 
This optimism in the face of general pessimism in the industry worldwide is due to a number of factors, with two being particularly pertinent: a general move to “higher quality” tourists and the appearance of new international markets.
 
Phuket, Thailand’s No 1 island destination, is a good example of how this has worked. The island has recovered completely from the Asian Tsunami disaster of 2004, which naturally put a huge dent in tourist arrivals, especially as it happened at the very peak of the annual “high season” for tourism.
 
But in the past three years the growth in the number of tourists coming to the island has outstripped the national average. Partly this is due to confidence returning after the tsunami but already, by last year, the number of visitors had exceeded the 2004 pre-tsunami figure – 4.8 million in 2004 and just over 5 million in 2007. Although figures for 2008 are not yet available, local TAT staff say that they are running ahead of those at this time last year.
 
Also steadily rising has been the amount the average visitor spend per day in Phuket. From 3,295 baht a day in 2004, the amount rose to 4,120 last year – in increase over three years of 28 percent. Over the same period, the amount of time foreign visitors spend on the island has also increased, from 5.20 days to 5.57.
 
As a result, Phuket’s income from tourism has expanded from 86 billion baht in 2004 to 94 billion last year.
 
So tourists clearly like Phuket. Why? One reason is the drive to make the island more attractive to “higher quality” visitors. The TAT has for years aimed at such visitors, though its aims have always seemed rather modest, targeting a small annual increase in the average daily spend.
 
The island’s authorities have worked hard at improving the infrastructure. A second terminal has been added to the international airport and runway expansion is talked about. Roads are being widened, internet connections, which were slow and expensive five years ago, are now approaching respectable speeds, and many hotels, restaurants, bars and cafés offer free WiFi connections.
 
The private sector, too, has not been slow in raising the bar. The variety of cuisines available is now huge, allowing just about anyone to find the comfort of food they enjoy at home. Shopping centres, hospitals and cinemas have improved out of all recognition.
 
There has also been a significant swing to villa resorts to cater for truly high-end tourists. The average daily spend may be 4,120 baht (equivalent to about US$125, €77 or ₤61) but this simply reflects the large numbers of mainland Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean tourists on package tours.
 
At the top end, tourists are prepared to spend 15 times as much per night, or more, on accommodation alone. Much of this accommodation is in large villas with swimming pools, maid service and drop-dead gorgeous views of the sea.
 
Five years ago, very little such accommodation existed, and demand far outstripped supply. Property developers, swiftly realizing the potential, turned from a more traditional “you buy it and we’ll try to rent it out when you’re not here” model to a more sophisticated one involving villas being built around a central resort area, sometimes with a boutique hotel as well.
 
A good example of this model is The Village – Coconut Island on Koh Maphrao (Coconut Island) just off the east coast of Phuket.
 
The location was carefully chosen to appeal to families. Sheltered from the May-October southwest monsoon, it suffers little of the strong winds and heavy seas experienced on Phuket’s west coast and is therefore capable of attracting guests year-round.
 
The front row of villas – which range in size from two bedrooms to five – sits right next to the beach, facing out across the uniquely fascinating panorama of Phang Nga Bay. For those who would rather not swim in the sea, each villa has its own large pool in the garden.
 
Central facilities will include restaurants, a delicatessen, a large resort swimming pool, tennis courts, a gym and fitness centre, and access to a variety of boats, from canoes to Hobie Cats. Guests can, in fact, spend the whole of their holiday there without lacking for anything. But if they do get an urge to see the sights of Phuket or shop for items not available at The Village, transport to and from the big island takes a matter of five minutes (any time of night or day) on the resort’s fleet of speedboats.
 
The Village is not alone in offering this kind of holiday (although it is one of only a handful planned with this end in mind). Major five-star hotels are adding on villas, and villa developments are adding restaurants and other central facilities. The attraction of such a place to wealthy visitors is not hard to see.
 
Another factor adding to Phuket’s inexorably rising arrivals and revenue figures is the rapid emergence of new tourist markets.
 
In 2003 the then-President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, came to Thailand for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. While in Thailand, he and many of his entourage headed for Phuket for a little R&R. They lazed by the pool, swam, took in the sights and went game fishing.
 
They were enchanted and, after they returned to Moscow, word of Phuket’s attractions spread in ever-widening ripples through Russia’s elite. In the TAT’s figures for 2005, Russian visitors still came in such small numbers that they were lumped among “Others” in the stats. But by last year Russian arrivals had risen to 122,000 and Russians formed the seventh-largest national group among the island’s visitors.
 
The TAT, too, can take some credit for boosting arrivals from countries outside Phuket’s traditional markets – northern Europe and Asia. Thanks to roadshows and promotions it has staged in “new” markets, a much greater variety of people visit Phuket these days.
 
Eastern European countries apart from Russia are not yet listed individually, but together they brought 63,000 people to Phuket last year – more than Italy did. India (41,000), Saudi Arabia (5,000) and the United Arab Emirates (4,000) have all emerged from the “Others” listing to merit their own national entries.
 
The tourism industry in the world’s most popular destinations will probably take a huge knock this year from rising oil prices and global economic uncertainty, but it seems that, for Phuket at least, there is still plenty of upside.
 
For more information please contact The Village, Coconut Island on 00 66 878 888 082 or visit www.thevillage-coconutisland.com.
 
 

Creating Eden in Tropical Paradise

by Charlotte Ashton Phuket

It’s the Dream: the gorgeous holiday home in the tropics, the retreat from European or Antipodean winters. Strolling from your shady veranda onto the beach, or sitting in the Jacuzzi outside your clifftop home, sipping your mojito and toasting the sun as it sets over the horizon.

But none of this would feel right without the correct surroundings – a tropical garden bursting with all those astonishing plants that Grandpa Herbert used to grow so tenderly in his greenhouse, plants with exotic names like bougainvillea, frangipani, jasmine, lotus and hibiscus.
 
In Phuket, one of the hottest spots, so to speak, for tropical holiday homes – where the likes of fashion designer Issey Miyake, Formula 1 ace Kimi Räikkönen and even Oprah Winfrey’s lawyer have stunning pieds à terre – gorgeous tropical gardens are de rigeur, which is why the past 10 years have seen a flowering of landscape architects, designers and garden maintenance companies.
 
One of the first to grasp the potential was New Zealander Ross Palmer, who landed on Phuket 10 years ago. He landed right in the middle of controversy, too, with a brief to “fix” a beach in a national park, and the dunes behind it, in readiness for shooting of scenes for the Leonardo DiCaprio movie The Beach.
 
Murky Thai business interests vying for income from the large Hollywood crew persuaded naïve local eco-warriors that the movie company was destroying the environment along the beach. Protests followed and the movie makers were forced not only to restore the beach to its original condition – which had always been their intent – but also to monitor it for months afterwards.
 
“Partly because of the agreement with the Thai government and partly because of the pressure [from the environmentalists] the studio renewed my contract for another 18 months after shooting ended, and I came back to report and to do any necessary remedial work. I was here for three years on and off. They kept on paying me to come back – it was a great lark,” says Palmer.
 
Getting the Plot: In between checking on the dunes, Palmer got to know Phuket well. Tired of jetting between garden projects around Europe and along the US East Coast, he decided he could set up a practice on the island.
 
But it could be hard going in the early days. Indeed, ten years later, it can still be hard to get people to understand landscape design. Architects at that time tended to take a bulldozer and backhoe to the landscape to make it conform to their ideas. Many still do. “Most architects don’t look at land form – they alter the landscape to fit the buildings. Part of the services I offer [is to mitigate problems from this]. Few architects [even now] bring in the landscape architect at the early stages.
 
“It’s amazing to me [that people try] to make the landscape conform to the architecture rather than the architecture being responsive to the land form.”
 
Gradually, architects – or some of them – are getting the plot, and are calling Palmer in at the early stages. He has five projects at the sign-off stage in Phuket, two projects in his native New Zealand, and his biggest work-in-progress at the moment, a hillside resort hotel overlooking Kamala Bay in Phuket.
 
People can still be difficult, though, and not just architects. “I remember one site in the UK, a beautiful Elizabethan house on the top of a chalk hill and the owner – a big-name pop star – said. ‘I want to put a lake up here.’ And I said, “Don’t be ridiculous. Why would you want to do that? I mean, if you want to do it for a specific reason…” and he said, ‘No, I just think it would be interesting to see you try and do it.’ I told him, ‘No. Go away. You just joined my life-is-too-short list.’
 
“But because I have this approach, it’s very rare for people to try to put me in this kind of strait jacket. With some clients I have to say, ‘No, we’re not going to work together. It’s not going to work.’ You need to be heading in the same direction. I don’t like conflict. I don’t want to bash my head against a wall – it’s deeply uncomfortable. So with some clients, politely, no, it’s not going to work.”
 
The Village Gardener: For Australian horticulturist Tom Belcher, life is currently rather easier. The holder of degrees in horticulture and anthropology, he is assistant general manager and creator of landscapes at The Village – Coconut Island, an upscale beach-side property development on an island just off Phuket.
 
The beautiful houses in this resort-style development are just steps away from the water and, as befits a tropical home, each has wide glass doors that open to let the outside into the living and sleeping areas. It’s therefore doubly essential that the gardens just beyond these doors are lush, green and inviting, with scents that will delight the occupants.
 
The boss, Chris Gordon, founder of boating holidays giant Sunsail, allows Belcher a pretty free rein when it comes to developing the landscape.
 
“I could spend hours with Chris and a computer [showing him plans and computer-generated images], but I find that walking around with some pictures of plants and throwing my arms around, he gets the general idea. He’s pretty relaxed about letting me get on with it.”
 
He recalls one day when some large trees, brought down from Bangkok by truck and then barged across to the island, were craned into position next to one of the houses.
 
“Chris was sitting inside the house doing some work for a couple of hours and [during that time] a whole load of palms and two big trees were put in place. He came out, he walked round the corner and was just flabbergasted.”
 
Controlling interest: Things are sometimes less easygoing for Emily Gerrard, a former teacher from Inverness, Scotland, who has done landscape design part-time for many years and last year took the plunge, after 10 years in Phuket, turning landscape design and maintenance into a full-time business. Villa owners can sometimes be demanding, she says, and architects can sometimes be impractical in their demands.
 
“Affluent villa owners are invariably used to getting what they want and have been very good at achieving this in their lives, particularly in business, in many cases by controlling matters in minute detail.
 
“However, nature doesn’t work like that and sometimes clients need to learn to be more flexible when working with nature. Horticulture and landscaping don’t fit easily into preset boxes like, for example, accounting does.
 
“Planting an eight-metre coconut tree on top of a concrete septic tank or creating an English meadow on a salt-burnt monsoon coastline is not going to be successful, no matter how much you want it to be.”
 
She has clear ideas about designing a garden in the tropics. For instance, she says, “I like a garden that fits in with the natural surroundings. If your house backs onto a plantation of rubber trees and you put a hedge in there, or formal borders and flower beds, it’s going to look odd. The same if you put in palm trees; the rubber forest behind is going to look like a wall.
 
“If you plant more forest-type trees, or natural flowing shrubs, they will blend in. This will make the garden look bigger, too. You can still have a modern minimalistic garden, but you do have to look at how it blends in with the surroundings. That’s very important.”
 
She’s not, keen, either, on “too many colours and textures” but, in the end, she concedes, “that’s my own personal taste – it’s their garden, after all”.
 
Palmer tries to get such matters ironed out early on, and has enough work these days to walk away if it looks as though he and the owner or architect won’t see eye to eye.
 
“I’m not an artist. I’m not trying to make a point. Landscape architecture is akin to building architecture – it should fulfill the client brief and respond to its situation. In terms of stylistic issues that you might have with a client, when you begin to design it’s the battle you come across most often. At that stage you are at the whim of people who say, ‘That’s what I want and you make it happen’.
 
“At my stage in my career, if people don’t know what I’m doing, they work it out when they begin to talk to me and if it’s not going to work it’s not going to work, so I tend not to have those kinds of battles now.”
 
The Journeyman: He studies voraciously everything he can find about the creation of gardens and has developed his own philosophy of garden design. “People tend to see themselves as separate from nature. There’s this twin-track world we’re supposed to live in. But it’s just not true.
 
“This understanding informs everything I do. I’ll look at the system that exists on the land. In my head there is no split between man and nature, and so I’m never worried about seeing the hand of man in any of my designs.”
 
He is also convinced that a garden, in a philosophical sense, is not a static thing with the owner of the property as its centre and apex.
 
“All landscape for me is about journeying. If you’re walking through a forest you spend most of your time looking down because of the tree roots. You can’t rely on the walking surface. But on a flat street, you can walk along looking at your friend and chatting with him.
 
“I’m very interested in this, forcing people sometimes to break their step. In a garden in London I placed three rills across the path, out of step. I wanted to make people aware that they were crossing something. I don’t believe life must always be comfortable, so why must gardens always be comfortable?”
 
Ask Belcher how he goes about creating gardens at The Village, and the reply is distinctly more down-to-earth. “Ground preparation is key. That takes more than 50 percent of the time. Ground leveling, making sure the water is running off in the right direction. Putting in the compost, sub-drains where necessary.”
 
The landscape crew at The Village – currently 25 people but expected to grow to 60 – make their own compost to mix with the local soil, which is thin and poor in nutrients. “We use 3,000 bags of cow manure and two 10-wheel trucks of coconut mulch every two months, mixed together with gypsum. It’s the foundations of the garden. If you don’t do it, then it won’t work.”
 
Very little in the way of chemicals is used, Tom adds. “We just put on more compost and chopped coconut with a little bit of chemical fertiliser to help the coconut break down.”
 
Pointy Bums: Both Gerrard and Palmer are, of course, well versed in the practicalities, too. Gerrard notes that while it’s easy to grow stuff in the tropics – “You turn your back and what was a small shrub has turned into a jungle” – there are also an awful lot of pests to do battle with. “They’re under the lawn, in the tops of the palms and everywhere in between. It doesn’t take them long at all to strip a plant.”
 
“I’m learning about more natural remedies using Thai herbs. You can use wasps to get rid of a lot of pests. But of course, wasps sting – that’s why they have pointy bums. If it was my garden then I’d try [these and other natural remedies], but I can’t do that when I’m paid to look after someone else’s garden.” Chemical warfare is sometimes a regrettable necessity.
 
Palmer says, “Bugs don’t worry me so much. If you set up an environment where you respect local conditions you tend not to get too many problems. I’m not an organic person at all, but all my experience tells me that the fewer things you put in that need attention, the fewer problems you’re going to get.”
 
He concedes, however, that rubber plantations can be a problem, especially if you have one right next door – and Phuket has thousands of hectares under rubber. “Rubber is a particularly poor ecosystem. Very little can live in there, so you’re surrounded by big green deserts.” As a result, all the pests that can’t survive in those deserts move into your comfortably lush garden, and feast.
 
But these are challenges that Palmer, Gerrard and Belcher excel in overcoming, so that the owners of tropical homes such as those at The Village can enjoy the dream to the full, surrounded by all the astonishing lushness and vibrancy of a tropical garden.