Phuket’s hotels earned more per room in 2025 and filled fewer of them. That combination decides what a rental unit actually returns, and on this island it is not the same story on every beach.
Observation note
Figures are from the C9 Hotelworks Phuket Hotel & Tourism Market Update 2026, published March 2026 and accessed 12 August 2026. Performance figures cover full-year 2025 against 2024. This is a hotel dataset — it describes hotel room revenue, not villa or condominium rental income, and not completed property transactions. It is the closest published proxy for Phuket short-stay demand, not a substitute for a specific building’s own numbers.
Direct answer
Island-wide, average daily rate rose 5% while occupancy fell 6%. Phuket is defending price by accepting emptier rooms. For a buyer, that is the number that matters: a rate card can look strong while the nights that fill it thin out, and rental income is the product of both.
Where the split is sharpest
The island average hides a wide spread. C9 breaks 2025 performance out by submarket:
Read the columns against each other rather than down the island average:
Bang Tao is the strongest pairing on this data — a 20% rate rise for only a 2% occupancy give-up. Rate growth there was substantially absorbed rather than bought.
Surin took 21% more per room and gave up 9% of occupancy. Still a favourable trade at these magnitudes, but a costlier one than Bang Tao’s.
Kamala is the outlier and the reason this article exists. Occupancy fell 24% — the steepest on the island — while C9 records its ADR as roughly 40% above Bang Tao’s. A high rate that empties the building is not the same asset as a high rate that fills it, and Kamala is the submarket where a buyer should ask hardest for building-level occupancy rather than accepting an island or segment average.
Patong still posts the island’s highest occupancy despite an 8% decline. The mass and budget segment is losing nights from the highest base.
C9 does not publish an ADR change for Kamala or Patong in the figures available here, so those cells are marked n/d rather than inferred.
What is behind the demand side
Phuket recorded 8.8 million arrivals in 2025. C9 notes a decline in Chinese visitors over the period, with a gradual recovery expected — the island held its arrival base by replacing that source market rather than by growing overall.
That is the mechanism behind the rate-over-occupancy pattern. A visitor mix rebuilt from different source markets does not book the same rooms, at the same seasons, at the same rates as the one it replaced. Rate discipline held; the nights did not.
Supply is still arriving
C9 counts 41 hotel projects planned for 2026–2030, with Phuket’s total supply expected to pass 100,000 keys by 2026. Roughly 30% of that pipeline sits in Bang Tao and Cherngtalay.
That concentration is worth holding next to the performance table above. Bang Tao is simultaneously the submarket that best defended occupancy in 2025 and the one absorbing the largest share of new supply. Those two facts pull in opposite directions over the same window, and the 2025 result does not price in rooms that have not opened yet.
What it means for a buyer
If you are buying for rental return, three things follow.
Ask for occupancy, not just rate. A managed unit quoted on ADR alone tells you half the equation. The island gave up 6% of its nights while raising rates 5%; a building can do the same and still present well on a rate card.
Treat the submarket as the unit of analysis. A 2% occupancy decline in Bang Tao and a 24% decline in Kamala are the same island, the same year, and completely different investments. Our comparison of condo and villa returns in Phuket covers how the asset type interacts with this.
Discount pipeline-heavy areas for future competition. Thirty per cent of a 41-project pipeline landing in one corridor is a supply signal for that corridor specifically.
This also sets a floor under any yield figure quoted to you. A developer’s 7–10% projection is a claim about a building; C9’s numbers describe the market that building will compete in, and in 2025 that market was trading nights for rate. Our guide to how Phuket rental yields are actually calculated sets out what a defensible figure has to net out.
What remains unknown
- ADR changes for Kamala and Patong, which C9 does not state in the figures available here.
- RevPAR by submarket, which would combine rate and occupancy into one comparable number. C9 does not publish it in this update.
- 2026 performance to date. These figures are full-year 2025; the update was published in March 2026.
- How much of the 41-project pipeline is funded and under construction versus announced.
- Villa and condominium rental performance, which this hotel dataset does not measure.
This article is not investment advice.