Where in February there were three rows of chairs, with effect from Friday there were just two.
Roy and Ranne, tourists from Norway, grumbled, “It was better before when it was three rows, which meant there were enough seats and we didn’t have to fight to get the chair that we paid for.
“Now we need to come down early in the morning to reserve a seat. The weather is too hot, it is impossible for us to sit on the sand.”
Sunan Boonrat, Chairman of the local Beach Chair and Umbrella Club in Kata/Karon, explained to The Phuket News that the club’s own regulations limit members to two rows of chairs.
But on December 1, with record numbers of tourists arriving, the club had asked for and had received the local council’s agreement to increase that to three rows.
However, the agreement was strictly temporary, and expired on the last day of February. On March 1, therefore, beach chair operators cut back again to two rows.
This sparked plenty of complaints from tourists, with some saying that they couldn’t find vacant chairs to lounge on and others saying they had reserved chairs only to come back and find them occupied by other people.
“There were lots of cases this morning,” said Jarun Kakkor, a beach chair owner. “Many tourists left their towels on chairs in order to reserve them, but when they went up to buy drinks or to take things back to their hotel rooms they came back down to the beach to find their chair taken by other tourists.”
Mr Sunan said the club’s two-row regulation had been set in 1986 when there were far fewer tourists. In the past two years in particular great numbers of tourists had been arriving in Phuket and looking for beach chairs.
“This year, even in March, there are still lots of tourists so if we provide only two lines of the chairs, it’s definitely not enough for the tourists.
“I’ve noticed that on beaches in other parts of the island there are three rows of chairs.” (The Phuket News counted four rows in Patong.) “We should all have the same regulations,” Mr Sunan added.