Outside the Illuzion nightclub, workers daubed fresh paint on to peeling pillars. At the Dublin Irish pub, staff installed new tables and chairs. And at the Red Lady and Sweetie bars, waitresses were busy polishing counters.
Bangla Road, a brash stretch of nightlife haunts on the once-teeming Thai holiday island of Phuket, was brushing up its gaudy façade last week.
A few miles along the Andaman coast, managers at the luxurious Anantara resort have called long-furloughed staff back to their old jobs.
After the misery of the pandemic, Phuket is hoping for better times. In a region whose frontiers remained sealed against the coronavirus later than most of the world, Thailand has just taken the boldest step yet towards a full reopening to foreign tourism.
Phuket had already played a key role in the move away from isolation. Under a pilot scheme launched in July, the island was the first place in Thailand to receive foreign tourists without full quarantine for more than a year.
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The government’s Phuket Sandbox pilot project allowed double-jabbed visitors to move around the island during their quarantine instead of being confined to hotel rooms. After a fortnight, and a series of PCR tests, visitors could venture anywhere in the kingdom.
The approach enabled officials to test entry rules and eased some public fears about the return of overseas visitors but in practice the onerous conditions — including a location tracker app, extra insurance cover and a mandatory certificate of entry issued by a Thai embassy — meant that the scheme appealed more to returning Thais and expats than tourists.
Now the whole country is opening up. The initiative, viewed as an experiment by some and a gamble by others, is being closely scrutinised by Thailand’s neighbours, where more tentative steps to welcome back selected tourists are being rolled out. China is Asia’s last redoubt of a “fortress” campaign to try to contain Covid.
As of November 1, vaccinated travellers from Britain and 62 other “low risk” nations and territories have been allowed to enter Thailand under a Test and Go scheme that requires new arrivals to spend their first night in an approved hotel pending the result of an on-arrival PCR test.
If it is negative, they are free to travel. If they — or a passenger seated next to them on the aeroplane — tests positive, they must spend the next ten days in a private hospital.
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In the first four days of the new system, more than 13,000 people, including 1,000 from Britain, flew into Thailand. Just ten tested positive for Covid-19.
Given the presence on the “low risk” list of several countries with high infection rates, including the UK, some Thais have questioned whether the designation is based more on spending power than virus tallies.
It is certainly no coincidence that Thailand has launched Test and Go at the start of the traditional tourist high season in southeast Asia.
Few countries were as exposed to a collapse in international tourism as Thailand. It received 40 million foreign visitors in 2019 (including a million from Britain), 6.7 million last year as the pandemic bit and then fewer than 100,000 arrivals in the first ten months of this year.
The impact has been devastating. The pre-pandemic tourism sector accounted for up to a fifth of GDP and of employment, according to the International Monetary Fund, but the country’s economy shrank by 6.1 per cent last year, the largest contraction since the Asian financial crisis of 1997.
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Phuket, a destination for 25 per cent of travellers to Thailand, was particularly reliant on an industry that had tipped from mass tourism to overtourism.
The snaking expanses of shuttered restaurants and shops and abandoned “ghost” hotels, their hulking structures turning mouldy in the tropical climes, suggests that many businesses will not bounce back.
Noi Saengthongtul, a masseuse hoping for customers to return to her empty tented beachfront site, said that most of her fellow workers had returned to their home villages in the country’s rural heartlands.
But she was optimistic about the prospects since November 1. “Business can only get better after all,” she said. “The last 18 months have been bad, really bad.”
There are some hopeful signs. John Brown, chief executive of the travel website Agoda, said there had been a seven-fold increase in searches for Thailand trips since the November 1 reopening.
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Frederic Varnier, managing director of Anantara Hotels in Phuket, said that a change of course was crucial.
“Thailand had prided itself on being one of the safest places in the world with some of the most stringent rules,” he said.
“But as infections spread from inside the country, rather than imported from outside, they had to review the policy of isolation. If they do not open up, it’s not the virus that would kill the country. It would be starvation.”
It has been a similar story across the country. Ohm Chansuwan, co-director of the Hidden Bangkok tour company, has watched as many friends in the tourism sector saw their businesses close.
“People didn’t just lose money, they lost their sense of worth,” he said. “If tourism starts to return to normal next year, then I will be very happy. That would be much quicker than I had expected.”
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Thailand has launched its reopening even as the country is still emerging from a near-lockdown over the summer when it was battered by the Delta variant and hobbled by a faltering vaccine rollout.
In the country of 69 million people, infections peaked at more than 20,000 daily cases two months ago, and now hover below 10,000. After a vaccination campaign targeting popular destinations and big cities, about 70 per cent of the population have received two jabs in places such as Bangkok and Phuket.
But the national average for double inoculations stands at 40 per cent, prompting fears that the country could be exposed to fresh outbreaks carried by tourists.
Prayut Chan-o-cha, the prime minister, acknowledged the dangers in a speech laying out the reopening plans. “I know this decision comes with some risk, because when we open the country, there will be an increase in infections, no matter how good our intentions,” he said.
At airports, new arrivals last week were greeted by staff handling their paperwork in full hazmat outfits. Visitors from Britain will notice another big difference — mask adherence is widespread and, in many places, compulsory.
Bars remain closed and restaurants can serve alcohol only until 9pm, but those rules are expected to be eased soon — to the alarm of some public health experts.
Otherwise life is coming back to normal, with temples, palaces and stores open again.
Russell Crowe, the Australian actor, entered the country via the Phuket Sandbox scheme in September to film a movie. He subsequently posted a series of messages from his Twitter account, which has 2.7 million followers, detailing his travels.
“It’s a beautiful, interesting, exciting place,” he wrote after the November 1 reopening was announced. “The people are warm and welcoming. If you have been locked down, isolated, quarantined, etc, travel is back.”
