Global Beachfront Awards - Thailand's 1,250 beachfront hotels beat all famous beach countries to win

BANGKOK - Aug. 16, 2014 - PRLog -- Thailand, a world away from the traditional beach countries of the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, now rides a rising wave of beach tourism that has seen it take the momentum from the old, well- worn sea-sand-sun destinations.

In the newly announced Global Beachfront Awards, which counts the number of true beachfront accommodations in 109 countries around the world, Thailand won top spot with an amazing 1,250 true beachfront hotels and resorts, followed by the USA with 1,016, Mexico with 943, Spain with 736 and Greece with 576.  The Top 10 countries includes two other rising stars in beach tourism, Philippines and Sri Lanka – which helps show the future shape beach tourism and tourism at large.

http://www.thebeachfrontclub.com/guide/global-beachfront-awards

The beach is the top destination in travel, which in turn is the world's biggest industry, accounting for about 5%of global GNP, figure from the World Tourism Organization (WTO) show.  The new Global Beachfront Awards are issued by The Beachfront Club (http://www.thebeachfrontclub.com/), a website that maps all beachfront hotels on the planet in detail not seen elsewhere. 'True beachfront', by the criteria of this Club, includes only those hotels directly on a beach or oceanfront with no road or traffic between the rooms and the water.

Thailand's win follows its meteoric, 88% rise in tourist numbers over the past five years, overriding both the global depression and its own well-publicized, internal political upheavals.  Street violence and grenade attacks in Bangkok did little to slow the country's burgeoning tourism business, which consistently outperformed all other global players by wide margins over the last five years.  Figures from the United Nations World Tourism Organization (WTO) show that in 2013, for the first time, Thailand rose to join the world's Top 10 most visited countries.  This world-winning performance was powered by millions of international visitors flocking not to its golden temples but mainly to its beautiful tropical beaches.  Last year 12 of Thailand's 27 million international tourists visited the island of Phuket alone. http://thebeachfrontclub.com/beach-hotels/asia/thailand/

The Global Beachfront Awards claim to have accounted for over 12,000 accommodation establishments on beaches in 109 countries.  The awards are a measure of the number of true beachfront accommodation establishments a country offers, and include all levels from beach bungalows to luxury, 5-star resorts.

"True beachfront is the first choice of beach-lovers worldwide" says website founder John Everingham, an Australian and long-term resident of Thailand.  "Especially for those who travel halfway around the planet, and spend large sums of money seeking the perfect beach."  The website is designed, he says, to help people find beachfront hotels anywhere on the planet while avoiding the misleading advertising of hotels that pretend to be on a beach, when in fact they aren't.  "Old hotel brochures were often designed to leave out roads and make a hotel appear to be right by the sand.  Today it's still commonplace on websites," he says.  "The Beachfront Club allows users to avoid such misleading advertising."

This photographer's own work shooting Phuket hotels in the 1990s became the inspiration for the website.  Assigned to hide roads and make the hotels look like they were right on the beach, when they weren't, his embarrassment and motivation for the website is documented in a CNNGo story: http://travel.cnn.com/bangkok/visit/new-online-database-s...

Measuring only true beachfront hotels might not give a complete picture of a country's beach tourism industry, says the Everingham.  "However, it provides a good look at the top end of each country's industry.  It helps show how tourism has penetrated a country's beaches, and shows how much choice each country provides to beach-loving visitors.  One old-style, large hotel with hundreds of rooms cannot satisfy as many different tastes as several smaller ones scattered on different beaches."  Smaller, more personalized hotels, boutique and creative, says this web entrepreneur, are the trend all across Southeast Asia, the region of the world with the fastest growth by far in international arrivals, according to the WTO's figures.

Momentum in global beach tourism shows a clear migration from the old destinations to the new, tropical islands and beaches of Asia.  With long-distant air transport times and costs at all-time lows, beach-lovers are willing to spend 10 or more hours on a plane in the search for newer beaches and more natural environments.

Thailand, with shores facing both Pacific and Indian Oceans, and hundreds of islands in each, is clearly the biggest winner in the latest blush of humanity's on-going love affair with the beach.  Now that it's right at the top of global beach tourism, it will need to consider something it has not yet stopped to ponder, says The Beachfront Club founder John Everingham – how to preserve its beaches' natural beauty and help it stay on top.