This is what happened this week to some 400 employees of Rawai’s rather run-down Evason Resort.
The staff, if they had thought about it, might however have seen it coming. The owner, Sonnu Shivdasani, the darling of glossy hi-so magazines, recently sold his Six Senses management company, which managed 14 resorts in exotic places around the world. He also owned the Evason Phuket itself, so it too was probably on his “sell” list.
The new owner, whose identity is not known, wisely grasped the nettle, closing the resort for extensive renovation. This allows him, under Thai law, to duck the massive payments he would have had to make if he had laid off long-serving staff without closing the resort first.
This was a nettle that Mr Shivdasani did not grasp when he bought the Evason 12 years ago from Deutsche Bank. Some of the staff have been with the hotel since it opened as the Phuket Island Resort more than 30 years ago, the first upscale resort on the island.
Mt Shivdasani’s managers are known to have had problems with some of the heavily unionised staff who did not want to change the way they worked, or to learn new tricks – but he could not weed them out without massive payoffs equivalent to one month’s pay for each year served.
For the staff, this week’s news was undoubtedly shocking and frightening. But in fact, for them, it also could not have come at a better time. The island is desperately short of trained manpower for hotels, so all but a handful should be able to find new jobs quite fast.
The new owner is going to find it a lot harder to replace them.