Meanwhile, other Phuket hotels doing quite well
Phuket enjoyed the highest occupancies in Thailand during April according to the latest Thai Hotels Association’s performance report presented at its members meeting Wednesday.
Thursday 24 May 2012, 05:43PM
THA’s new president, Surapong Techaruvichit. told TTR Weekly the report was provisional as some data still needed to be processed, but it showed Phuket enjoyed a 77.18% occupancy rate, up 10.26% over the same month last year.
Other major destinations in the South, such as Krabi and Phang Nga, failed to match the performance of their island neighbour reporting 32.22% and 38% respectively.
Occupancy in Bangkok during April stood at 61.79%, up 8% for small hotels (less than 249 rooms) and 60.4%, up 6.13% for big hotels (more than 250 rooms).
Chiang Mai also performed well; occupancy stood at 53.53%, up 15.89%. However, Chiang Rai saw a drop of 6.54% to 33%.
Occupancy in Pattaya dropped 7.98% to 59.81% even though the resort was busy mainly due to a rise in bookings at apartments and small hotels that are not members of the THA.
Mr Surapong said the association was seeking clarification on the minimum wage issue and hoping to convince the government to allow hotels to include the service charge in the minimum wage calculation set at Bt300 a day.
In an update, the Ministry of Labour agreed that the service charge could be included in the salary if the hotels guaranteed a service charge level and provided evidence that the amount had been paid in full to the employees every month.
On the marketing side, THA will host four table-top sales sessions in four markets: Chinese speaking market (this Friday); domestic market (6 July); Russian market (to be announced) and MICE market (TBA).
THA welcomed four new members: Jasmine Resort, Bangkok; Nim Hotel Chiang Mai Airport, Nouvo City Bangkok and Grande Centre Point Hotel Bangkok.
Currently, THA has 778 members, of which 587 are ordinary members, 98 are association members, 70 are extra-ordinary members and 23 are honorary members.
