Air Asia’s first Hotel Tune has opened in Kuala Lumpur.

Looking at the current phenomenal regional expansion of Asian lowcost airlines (LCCs) such as Air Asia, Nok Air, Tiger and Jet Star, the question that always comes up is just how much more market demand can they generate? Is it a fad or is the face of travel evolving into uncharted territory?

According to several local developers, one key trend that is emerging is that the door-to-door access provided by the regional LCC’s is becoming a significant factor in new property transactions.

Regional aviation analysts are quick to point out that comparisons between the US, Europe and Asia in terms of air travel are not always relevant. Whereas road and rail links within the US and Europe are prevalent ways to travel, in Asia the airways are the “roadways” between key cities and countries. Let’s face it, not many people will be driving to Hong Kong or Bali on their next holiday.

Developing Asian countries with such enormous populations often leapfrog even Western countries in new technology or trends simply by means of economies of scale.

A case in point is the mobile phone boom in India, where there are hundreds of millions of potential users, it is faster to install modern mobile networks than traditional land lines to keep up with the demand. The same could easily be said for aviation in Asia which is home to half the world’s population.

One of the best case studies of the LCC’s has been Air Asia from Malaysia. Coming with a bold Internet booking strategy, providing limited services (with options on a per pay basis) the airline by June 2006 had flown more than 9 million passengers with just 40 aircraft.

It expects to have nearly 100 aircraft in the skies by 2010 and AirAsia.com is ranked by Google as the No 1 travel site in Asia.

The direct customer approach in booking with the airline and not travel agents, offering lower prices and flexible rates that offer nearly anyone the option of overseas travel is changing the face of the industry.

With the Asian economies currently growing and the emergence of a larger middle class, the region’s LCCs are able to service strategic markets, such as China, India, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia.

While LCCs are often construed to cater only to those without money, the fact is that it creates more frequent travel among a larger market of travelers. It’s cheaper for someone who is Singapore-based to fly to Phuket than to spend a weekend in, say, Bintan.

Backed by the use of new airplanes and easy web-based reservations, you can plan an international trip with a few clicks of your computer mouse. The impact this increase in airplane seats has on tourism to a market such as Phuket is significant.

One of the key demand drivers for property is return tourists, who make repeat visits to the island and ultimately end up buying a villa or condo here. In a destination resort such as Laguna Phuket, which has strong brand equity, a large portion of their residential buyers are guests who have stayed at the resort many times for years. It’s a simple equation: the more tourism grows, the greater the impact on property sales.

An interesting development of the LCC’s growth is that these carriers are now entering the hotel market. EasyJet has started a hotel brand and now Air Asia has launched Tune Hotels.

In what’s bound to raise eyebrows and perhaps cause a few hotel chains to rethink the way they do business, are the innovations of the product. Selling rooms the same as airline seats, direct, prepaid and rates vary depending on how far in advance you book.

Services have been stripped down to offer only a basic room, TV and bathroom, with extras such as air-conditioning and a towel charged if they are requested. There are no phones in the room as they presume everyone already carries a mobile.

Hotel lobby space is leased- out retail space to a convenience shop. Housekeeping and maintenance are outsourced and the average number of staff for a single property is 10. While not suitable for everyone, the product allows a wider range – and a greater number – of people to get on an airplane and have affordable holidays abroad.

Tune has opened its first hotel in Kuala Lumpur and has another 10 under development at locations the airline flies to.

However, the jury is still out on the long-term viability of the LCCs both here and worldwide. In the past, airlines have followed cyclical trends, but as technology changes new startups such as these seem to be able to embrace it and introduce new products at a rate much faster than legacy carriers.

On a recent flight on Tiger Airways from Singapore, I was startled to see business travelers and affluent local residents in greater numbers then I have ever seen before.

For the property development business in Phuket and beyond, the LCCs are going to change the way we see our market for a very long time.

Bill Barnett is Managing Director of C9 Hotelworks (c9hotel works.com), a Phuket-based hotel and residential property consulting firm. With more than 20 years’ experience in the region, he has played an active role in some of the island’s biggest developments.

Sawasdee Residence, a residential villa development in the foothills north of Patong, has begun building its first display home with the aim of completing the development by 2010.

Close to the heart of Patong but far enough to avoid the traffic and noise, the luxury pool villa development by Thai developer Sawasdee Residence Co Ltd has launched its project on 10 rai on the east side of Phra Barami Rd.

Pawat Nisagorn, a member of the developer’s committee, told the Gazette that Sawasdee Residence has been a long time coming, but developers now think the project will be completed by 2010.

The development will have 25 three- and four-bedroom pool villas surrounded by gardens. Three villa designs are available – types A, B and C – but they are all two-story, single-pool villas on plots ranging from 384 to 600 square meters. Prices will range from nine to 15 million baht; three of the units have been sold.

“We started our project in 2005, but we officially launched it in December last year. Now we are constructing a B-type show home, which is expected to be completed within the next three months. We will start the C- and A-type show homes around October. We expect that the project will be completed within three years.”

“The property market is slowing down, especially in developments that are not located in seaview locations.

“For us I think that when the show homes are finished, they will help our market run easier,” K. Pawat said.

“Our B-type show home will take about three more months to complete because we would like to have the best interior detail.

“With the premium-grade materials and luxury design, I think it’s a good value for the price,” he added.

Each of the 10 A-type villas will have three bedrooms and three bathrooms. On the ground floor, the living and dining room will be connected, but the main kitchen and a Thai kitchen will be separate.

There will also be a washing room, a maid’s room and a carport for two cars. Total usable area for A-type villas is 336sqm, including an infinity-edge swimming pool measuring 3.8 meters by 7.4m.

The B-type villas will have four bedrooms and four bathrooms, with 359sqm of usable space.

While B-types have a similar design to the A-type villas, the fourth bedroom will be on the ground floor with bay windows looking out over the private pool. There will be eight B-type villas in the project.

C-type villas will be the smallest of the three types, with three bedrooms and three bathrooms and a total of 280sqm usable space plus a 15sqm pool. The project will include eight of these units.

“The location of the project is a big selling point because it is so close to Phuket City and yet has easy access to Patong, which makes it very convenient for businesspeople who do business in both Patong and in town, and who want to have access to the city’s facilities,” K. Pawat said.
“The villa’s design is a mix of modern and contemporary design, since we didn’t want to have the Thai-style design seen in so many projects.”

Asked about the intended customers for the villas, K. Pawat said, “Although our project has a luxury living resort theme, we also aim to attract Thai customers, which I think we will be able to do because the prices are affordable for people in Phuket.

“For foreigners, all buying and selling conditions will follow Thai law,” he said.

The project’s architect is Somchai Tiatrakul from Triaxial Co Ltd, an experienced Thai architect. The construction contractor is Phuket-based Trimitr Engineering Co Ltd.

For more information contact Sawasdee Residence sales office at 47/14 Phra Barami Rd. Tel: 076-203501-2. Fax: 076-203 503. Email: sawasdee.pk@gmail.com Website: www.sawasdeeresidence.com

By Bloomin' Bert

A Brief History of Gardening

The pina, later renamed pineapple, is one of the many non-indigenous plants transplanted from its native land to a prodigious number of disparate locales, including Thailand. Also, it looks pretty. Photo by David Monniaux

Iget bored with ‘experts’. Far too full of their own importance for my liking. They’re just so… well… smug. These people are interviewed on television and appear in the newspapers espousing their supposedly irrefutable views on the most bizarre of subjects.

Then someone else with an equally silly haircut and 1960’s National Health Service spectacles (not an attractive look) will come along and proclaim that actually they’d gotten it all wrong and that you should ignore everything previously mentioned on the subject and start again.

Salt is a good example. For years, salt was considered to be an essential part of the human diet. Then one of those scientist types appeared on the scene, shoved a few pounds of salt down a rat’s throat. The rat didn’t take too kindly to this, and died.

The conclusion was obvious – salt was deadly. It gained ‘evil’ status overnight, and the Western world was told that should we consume too much salt in our diets, that imminent death was inevitable. So we stopped eating the stuff. Food, as a result, is boring.

Interesting experts are few and far between. They all seem to want to do their best to behave like those polo-necked, Arran-sweatered chaps that appeared late night on BBC2 in the UK back in the ’60s and ’70s when Open University used to broadcast in black and white. They just seemed so obsessed with their charts and algorithms.

These late-night feasts were entertaining in themselves for a maximum of about five minutes after staggering home from the pub, insisting on a little televisual stimulation. The problem was that once that time had elapsed, you just wanted to throttle them and bring at least a little excitement into their monochrome lives.

Today’s most exciting scientist is the one with the least in physical personality, ironically enough. Stephen Hawking. He’s brilliant. He doesn’t have a wacky haircut or a spotty bow tie; he just sits there and explains things in a way that even I sometimes understand.

He may not be able to talk in the same way that many of us do, but he has a knack of making even those obscure subjects that many of us would runaway screaming from rather interesting, especially in his book A Brief History of Time. I have to say that I agree with the proposition that the unassailable sine qua non for a quantum physicist is that the quintessential homogeneity of Hawking’s theory should not be entirely challenged by academic empiricists in absentia.

No, I haven’t read it.

And so we move inevitably into things green and tropical. How about A Brief History of Gardening instead? Well, tropical gardening actually. There’s little point in droning on about tulips and crocuses, when they’re much more at home poking their heads through a blanket of frost.

Anyway, most people will know the story of Captain William Bligh, and the Fletcher Christian-led mutiny on board HMS Bounty. Perhaps fewer people are familiar with why he went to Tahiti in the first place and why a mutiny, once he left the island, was fairly inevitable.

He was sent there by a wealthy 18th century botanist, Joseph Banks, to collect 1,000 seedlings of a local version of the breadfruit to transport them to the West Indies to feed slaves working on the plantations.

It took almost five months for the seedlings to be ready to be transported, and during this time the sailors had become somewhat fond of the Tahitian ladies. In fact, a writer at the time claimed that “every man had his girl”. I can’t blame Mr Christian for being a bit miffed at being told they had to move on. As it happens, Captain Bligh did actually deliver the breadfruit seedlings to the West Indies a few years later – but the slaves didn’t like it.

Captain Bligh and his merry men weren’t the only ones to move plants around the globe in years gone by. On a visit to Guadeloupe, Christopher Columbus was given a weird-looking cone-shaped fruit. The Spanish visitors thought it looked a bit like a pine cone, so they called it a pina.

It later became known as the pineapple and found its way to many other tropical parts of the world including Madagascar, India and Hawaii where it was cultivated and became hugely popular. Today, most pineapples come from the Philippines, Malaysia and here in Thailand.

Columbus also ‘discovered’ the capsicum, or chili pepper. Bizarrely, the first seeds he sent back to Europe weren’t even used to grow plants to season food; people liked the look of the bright red and orange fruits, and used them for decoration. Very odd. They became so popular in Asia that their Mexican/South American origins were probably forgotten quite quickly.

Then there are the plants that made it overseas not because they were worth anything commercially, but people simply liked the look of them. The cordyline, or ti plant, for example doesn’t do much apart from looking good. In fact, early Polynesian visitors to Hawaii found it so impressive that they wove the leaves into leis for their priests.

The ‘experts’ in the world of gardening will put forward a whole list of reasons as to why we have the plants we have in our corner of the globe. Most of them spout twaddle – they’re here because our forefathers either thought that they could make money out of them or they looked good. Or both. Simple.

Unfortunately, my ‘brief history of gardening’ hasn’t been as brief as intended; in fact I think I’ll need to continue this at a later date. Now where did I put my spotted bow tie?