All together we asked 1645 tourists over 8 month about their traveling after the Tsunami. We went to various places like
restaurants, bars, hotels, tour informations, internet cafes, the beach and our trips to find different kinds of travelers.
You can see some trends as follows
If you take a look where the tourists in Phuket come from you see, that most people come from the UK (31%) followed by
Australia/New Zealand (21%) and USA/Canda (19%). Surprisingly 50% of them are singels with higher education (University 36%).
If you compare from Feb to Sep there is not a big difference why the people come to Phuket, mostly holiday and the minor part
for volunteerwork, business or visiting friends. Most of them stay in 4 or 5 stars beachfront hotels and they are not afraid
of being at the beach. In Feb-Mar there where a few tourist which had to book another hotel because their place was
still destroyed from the Tsunami but not in the following month (which shows how fast everything was rebuild!).
Through all 8 month you can see that the travelers where not thinking about canceling their trip to Phuket and mostly think the
situation of Phuket is much different than shown in the media, they think it is a lot better than presented.
Only in April more than 60 % answered to the question of attractiveness of Phuket that it is currently an unattractive destination.
The answers of the other month showed that Phuket is currently an attractive place to go to and might become even a more
attractive destination in the future. Visiting Phuket is helping the locales a lot more than donating money, is what almost everyone
thinks.
The activity questions are showing, that the "bad" sports are really popular and that the tourists not know if it has an impact on
the enviornment or not, but you also see that the enviornment is important for most of the visitors.
If you read through the comments of all the surveys why they choose Phuket as their holiday destination, you can see that almost
everyone comes to Phuket to help after the Tsunami. They want to spent there money for something good and to help the
economy of Thailand. Mainly they love the beaches, the kindness of the Thai people and that Phuket is so family friendly
Many visitors are worried about Phuket and how it is promoted in their home countries.
Verena Kaiser		Sep-05