Seven hotels get official star ratings

PHUKET: Seven Phuket hotels have been assigned star ratings under a new classification system set up jointly by the Thai Hotels Association (THA), the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) and Association of Thai Travel Agents (ATTA). The announcement was made by the new certifying body, the zippily-named Foundation of Standards and Human Resource Development in the Service and Tourism Industry, which named the seven as: 5-star: Dusit Laguna Resort Hotel; 4-star: Amari Coral Beach Resort, Cape Panwa Hotel, Club Andaman Beach Resort and Holiday Inn Resort Phuket; 3-star: Best Western Ocean Phuket Resort and South Sea Resort. Four other Phuket hotels applied for certification but fell short of the criteria. They were not named. Currently, there are 549 TAT-registered hotels and guesthouses in Phuket, comprising 31,302 rooms. Under the system, hotels choose the star ranking they wish to apply for after considering the criteria that need to be met. They are then inspected to see if they meet all the requirements. Hotels that fail to meet all the criteria, many of which are subjective in nature, have up to 180 days to make the necessary upgrades and apply for reinspection. Sithi Tandavanitj, President of the THA and owner of The Metropole hotel in Phuket City, said, “This is the second time the Foundation has conducted a certification round. In the first round, only 84 of 110 hotels [countrywide] were certified.” The inspection committee reporting to the Foundation comprises 10 people from tourism-related government agencies and and private-sector groups. Mana Chobtam, Director of TAT’s Product Promotion Department, said, “In the past, the hotels and tour operators identified the star-ratings of hotels by room rates alone [for lack of a better option]. There was no organization to rate Thai hotels. “There are 3,600 hotels in Thailand, comprising 300,000 rooms. Our Thai hotels and facilities and standards are as good as those in Europe and the US, but we lacked a good system to organize them,” K. Mana said. “In the future, it is possible that [Thai] government agencies, which spend an estimated 2 million baht a year on hotel functions, will use only hotels that have been assigned ratings,” he said. Dr Baramee Ruengkanjanaset, who helped draft the standards, explained that they were broken down into three sections: construction and facilities; maintenance; and service standards. He said that, of these, applicant hotels that were rejected failed to meet international standards only in terms of maintenance. “The nationwide hotel rating system is part of the government’s policy to have Thailand become a ‘world-class destination’ by 2008,” he said. Once issued, star ratings remain valid for three years, though subject to unannounced spot checks, he explained.