An effect of tsunami to hotel occupancy: A case of Phuket, Thailand

As a popular city for global tourists, more than one third of the Phuket GPP depends on the hotel and restaurant sector. The 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami caused a serious physical damage to hotels and a high cancellation of bookings in the post disaster period, which, in turn, led to most THB 3 billion drop of the hotel and restaurant sector income in 2005 in Phuket. In addition, many tourism facilities in Phuket suffered bankruptcy or a slump, because they started their business again immediately after the reconstruction phase, while tourists did not really come back. This paper is an initiative study of our research project to evaluate the effects of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami on Hotel Occupancy, with a focus on the speed for the physical reconstruction and tourism market recovery. We collected the physical reconstruction period and the hotel occupancy recovery data of six hotels that located in the Patong Beach of Phuket from 2003 to 2017. Through calculation, the average of damage rate (i.e., unavailability of the rooms in this study) is 55.89%, with an average speed for the physical reconstruction to rebuild the rooms about 6.07% of the overall rooms per month. The quotient of these two values indicates that the reconstruction period is around 9.2 months. However, the average period for reconstruction and tourism recovery is about 20 months. There is an about 11 months' delay between that hotel and resorts have finished the reconstruction and the tourists start to visit Phuket as usual. Therefore, the local government, local tourist authority, and hotel entrepreneurs can consider these findings in order to prepare the recovery plan for tourism industry in the future tsunami.