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PHUKET: -- The future is looking bleak for tsunami-hit Phuket, with revenues falling by half this year and the prospects for 2006 little brighter, the head of the Thai resort island's tourism body said on Thursday.

The island's tourism revenues, which usually account for a fifth of the Thai industry's income, would fall to 45 billion baht ($1.1 billion) this year from 85 billion baht last year, Phuket Tourist Association President Pattanapong Aikwanich said.
"Everyone has been hit very hard and we don't see a future yet," Pattanapong told Reuters in an interview.

"Phuket can barely survive now. We all are dying as every hotel is running losses of millions of baht each month," Pattanapong said six months after the giant waves crashed ashore at the height of the tourist season on Dec. 26.

The waves caused widespread damage on Phuket and elsewhere along the coast, leaving 279 people dead and 610 missing on the island alone. In total, 5,400 people died on Thailand's Andaman Sea coast and islands that day -- nearly 2,250 of them foreigners -- and 2,800 are still missing.

Phuket recovered swiftly, but tourists stayed away, with many people refusing to go on vacation in an area ravaged by death.

Only 15 percent of Phuket's 35,000 hotel rooms were occupied in May and June this year compared with 50 percent last year, only marginally better than in January, when the rate slumped to 10 percent from 90 percent a year before.

Advance room bookings for the coming high season starting in November, which should be flooding Phuket hotels by now, were very few, said Pattanapong, who owns two up-market hotels on the island.

"PEOPLE ARE SUSPICIOUS OF US"

Despite heavy publicity given to Thailand's blossoming early warning system -- with Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra himself supervising the first test of loudspeaker towers on a major Phuket beach -- it has failed to reassure, Pattanapong said.

"Tourists don't have confidence in our warning system. They don't know how effective it is," he said. It needed the cachet of independent approval, he added.

"What we need is certification by internationally recognised experts on our system. We just can't install it and certify it by ourselves since people are still suspicious of us."

There were no early warning systems or evacuation plans when the strongest earthquake in 40 years set off a tsunami that killed or left missing about 230,000 people and left more than a million homeless in 13 countries around the Indian Ocean rim.

Thailand has moved the fastest to rectify that.

By the end of the year, it intends to have an early warning system at sea which would transmit data to the new National Disaster Centre.

If a tsunami were detected, the system would send out alerts to media, text messages through mobile telephone networks and trigger sirens on 50 warning towers.

And if fears of the death and destruction in natural disasters were not enough, Phuket was also having to cope with fears of a spread of the violence in the country's Muslim far south, Pattanapong said.

The daily killings and bombings in which more than 700 people have been killed near the Malaysia border since January last year were keeping tourists from Malaysia and Singapore away from Phuket, he said.

Island hotels and Thai airlines would soon offer Thais and foreigners living in Thailand a Bangkok-Phuket return air ticket, airport pickup and two nights at a three-star hotel for just 3,500 baht ($86) until October, he added,

"We have to do this, otherwise we will surely die." ($US1 = 40.67 baht)

--Reuters 2005-06-17