destination · Phuket

Phuket in 2026: record 5.41 million arrivals, flat revenue, dry reservoirs and a jet ski scam police keep having to raid

Review of Phuket

Phuket is having the strangest kind of boom. More than 5.41 million passengers arrived through Phuket International Airport in 2025, up from 5.29 million in 2024 and above both the 5.36 million of 2018 and the 5.29 million of 2019. On paper that is a full recovery and then some. In practice the revenue did not follow the headcount, because the mix of who is arriving changed underneath it. The Chinese market, which used to supply more arrivals to Phuket than any other, fell by more than 40 per cent in 2025. Nationally, China sent 4.47 million visitors to Thailand against 10.9 million in 2019, and Malaysia narrowly took the top-source-market spot for the first time in years. What has grown instead is long haul: 10.8 million arrivals from Europe, the UK, the US and Australia, up 10.6 per cent and an all-time high, plus a large and still-growing Russian presence. Thailand as a whole took nearly 33 million international visitors in 2025. The practical version of that for a visitor is that Phuket is busy, that hotel occupancy is strong, and that the island's operators are working harder for the same money, which sharpens every existing incentive to squeeze the person who just got off the plane. The most famous of those is the jet ski scam, and it is not folklore. The pattern is fixed: a rental on the beach at Patong or one of the other tourist beaches, then a claim of damage on return, then a group of men and a demand for a sum with no relationship to any repair, settled on the sand while the renter is holding a flight time. Documented demands include 15,000 baht for water in an engine. Thai police have run busts on Phuket jet ski operators, which tells you both that it is real and that enforcement has not ended it. The only reliable defences are refusing the rental entirely, or filming the machine from every angle before touching it and refusing to hand over a passport as a deposit. The second is ground transport. Phuket's taxi and tuk tuk trade has a long-standing reputation as a cartel, with fares set well above meter rates and pressure applied at the airport and outside hotels. Tuk tuks in Phuket are notably more expensive than anywhere else in Thailand for the same distance. Grab and metered taxis exist and are the answer; agreeing a price before moving is the fallback, and the price should be agreed before you or your bags are in the vehicle. The slower problem is water. Phuket's reservoirs, Bang Wad, Klong Kata and Bang Neow Dum, have been running at reduced capacity, dry-season inflows do not meet demand, and consumption is rising by an estimated 11 per cent a year. Hotels have been served by water trucks during shortages, and the Bangkok Post has reported that the plan to fix the island's tap-water supply is going nowhere. It rarely ruins a holiday outright, but low pressure and trucked-in supply in the dry months are a real possibility, and it is worth knowing which side of that your hotel sits on. Underneath all of it, the reason people come is unchanged. The Andaman coast is genuinely beautiful, the food is excellent and cheap once you leave the beach road, and the parts of the island that are not Patong, the northern beaches, the east coast, the old town, are a very different and much calmer holiday than the one Phuket is famous for.

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