Why Phuket and not somewhere closer to home

Aoife and I have lived in Singapore for nine years. Most of our long weekends since 2019 have gone the same way: a Friday evening flight from Changi, a short hop north, and a taxi up the west coast before dinner. At some point we added up the hotel nights, and the question changed from where to stay to where to buy.

How we narrowed it down

We started with three parts of the island. Kata, which Aoife picked on our very first visit. Bang Tao, because friends of ours have a place near the lagoon and we know the roads. And the stretch around Rawai, because my brother is looking there for his retirement and it would be handy to be close.

For each area we wrote down the same four things: drive time from the airport, whether we could walk to food in the evening, how busy the road is outside, and whether the building has a pool people actually use. The last one sounds trivial, but on a short weekend we want to be in the water within an hour of landing.

Most evenings in October went on going through two bedroom units on https://tranio.com/thailand/phuket/apartments/ and copying the ones that fitted into a shared sheet. By the end of the month the sheet had nineteen rows, and fourteen of them sat within fifteen minutes of Kata.

What we look at on viewing day

Viewing day is a Saturday later this month, with three flats booked for one morning. Our list for the day is short:

  • light in the second bedroom in the afternoon, since that becomes the office on longer stays
  • where the air conditioning units sit and how loud they are from the balcony
  • storage, because we want to leave beach things and a few clothes there and travel with hand luggage only
  • the walk to the nearest place for breakfast

We are not in a rush. If none of the three feels right, we go back to the sheet and plan another weekend.

Why a flat and not a house

A house came up early, mainly because of the garden. In the end a flat won for practical reasons. Someone else looks after the building while we are in Singapore, the pool is maintained, and locking up on a Sunday night takes thirty seconds. For a place we will use most weekends and for one longer stay a year, that matters more than a lawn.