Phuket Tourismusstatistik

What these numbers count

Every figure on this page comes from the provincial tourism statistics that Thailand’s Ministry of Tourism and Sports (MOTS) publishes for Phuket: the annual Q1–Q4 files for the Southern region (Phuket sheet) for 2012–2025, plus the monthly provincial situation reports that run to Juli 2026. Nothing here is estimated or modelled by us. Where MOTS leaves a cell empty, the page shows a dash.

MOTS uses the UN tourism vocabulary, and the words matter. A visitor is anyone who travels to Phuket for a purpose other than employment. Visitors split into tourists, who stay at least one night in the province, and excursionists, who come and leave on the same day — cruise passengers, day-trippers from Phang Nga and Krabi, transit travellers. In 2025 Phuket recorded 14.248.853 visitors, of whom 13.042.914 were tourists and 1.205.939 excursionists. The Thai / foreign split is by residence, not passport: 10.748.204 foreign visitors (75.4%) and 3.500.649 Thai. The visitor series is an estimate from the ministry’s sample survey of accommodation and transport operators, not a count at a border.

The second family of numbers, guest arrivals at accommodation establishments, is a different thing and the page never mixes the two. A guest arrival is a check-in at a hotel, resort, guesthouse, serviced apartment or other registered accommodation in the province. One traveller who spends four nights in Patong and three in Bang Tao is counted twice; a family staying in a friend’s villa is not counted at all. This is the only series MOTS breaks down by nationality and by month, which is why the country pages and the monthly arrivals page are built on it. In 2025 there were 12.657.079 guest arrivals, 10.085.407 of them foreign.

Why the totals differ from “airport arrivals” in the press

Headlines about Phuket usually quote passenger numbers from Phuket International Airport (HKT), published by Airports of Thailand. Those count every passenger through the terminal, arriving and departing, domestic and international, residents included, and each connecting flight again. The MOTS visitor figure counts people, once, for the province; the guest-arrival figure counts check-ins. All three can be true at the same time and all three will be different. A visitor who arrives by road from Krabi never appears in the airport numbers; a Phuket resident flying to Bangkok for a weekend appears twice in the airport numbers and nowhere in the tourism statistics.

The practical rule for quoting Phuket: use visitors for the size of the market and its growth, use guest arrivals by nationality for the mix of source markets and seasonality, and use airport passengers only for airport capacity. A future layer of this site will carry the airport series separately; it will not be merged into these tables.

The shape of the series, 2012–2025

Phuket grew from 8.829.298 visitors in 2012 to 14.576.466 in 2019, the last full year before the pandemic, with hotel occupancy at 75.3% across 92.667 rooms. Foreign visitors made up 72.7% of the total that year and China alone supplied 3.118.901 guest arrivals — 32.2% of all foreign check-ins.

The COVID gap is not missing data; it is the real series. 4.028.829 visitors in 2020, then 1.236.480 in 2021 with occupancy of 6.7% for the whole year. In the second quarter of 2020 the province logged 90.083 visitors, almost all of them Thai, and occupancy of 2.6%; in April and May 2020 the Thai guest-arrival rows read zero because hotels were closed under the lockdown. The Phuket Sandbox reopening in July 2021 shows up as the first foreign check-ins after fifteen months of near-zero, and 2022 (5.767.471 visitors) is the transition year. Full recovery arrived in 2019: 14.576.466 visitors, the highest annual figure in the series, with 11.065.493 foreign visitors in 2024 and occupancy at 75.3%.

2025 closed at 14.248.853 visitors (−1.8% on 2024, −2.2% on 2019), occupancy 76.3%, average spend 8.563 THB per person per day and tourism revenue of 555.428 million THB. Spend per day has risen every year since 2021 in baht terms; revenue is a MOTS product of visitors, length of stay and daily spend, so it moves with all three.

The 2015 change of base for rooms and occupancy

The room stock jumps from 48.241 in 2014 to 82.962 in 2015. Phuket did not build 34.721 rooms in a year: MOTS re-based its register of accommodation establishments in 2015 (the file carries the note “ปรับฐานข้อมูลปี 2558”), adding properties that had not been in the survey frame. As a result rooms, the number of establishments and guest arrivals before and after 2015 are not directly comparable, and occupancy should be read with the same caution — a larger denominator with a similar numerator. Visitor totals, which come from the demand-side survey, are less affected. The charts on this page keep the raw series and mark nothing as “adjusted”, because any adjustment would be our estimate rather than the ministry’s figure.

Source markets: how the top three changed

In 2019 the leading foreign markets by guest arrivals were China (3.118.901, 32.2%), Russland (909.261, 9.4%), Deutschland (638.609, 6.6%). In 2025 they are Russland (1.748.249, 17.3%), China (1.285.894, 12.8%), Indien (1.029.588, 10.2%). China peaked at 3.118.901 check-ins in 2019 and stood at 1.285.894 in 2025; Russland went from 909.261 to 1.748.249; Indien from 225.535 to 1.029.588. The top ten together account for 74.2% of foreign guest arrivals, and the remaining 28 rows of the MOTS table (including the regional aggregates “East Europe”, “Middle East” and “Africa”, and the residual “Others”) make up the rest. Each of the twenty largest markets has its own page with the annual series and monthly seasonality; the monthly page compares the ten largest side by side.

Seasonality, before and after the pandemic

Averaged over 2013–2019, Januar carried 12.2% of the year’s foreign guest arrivals and August only 5.2%. Over 2023–2025 the curve is flatter: the busiest month, Dezember, takes 10.2% and the quietest, März, 7.5%. The reason is the mix: the winter-heavy European and Russian markets have been joined by Indian, Middle Eastern and Australian demand that peaks in the northern summer and around October, and Chinese travel that follows its own holiday calendar. In 2025 the busiest month for foreign check-ins was Dezember (1.026.381) and the quietest Juni (692.365). For the climate side of the same calendar — rain, sea state, sunshine by month — see the best-time-to-visit page.

Coverage, gaps and revisions

Annual blocks exist for 2012–2025; 2012 comes from the comparison columns of the 2013 file and lacks the establishment count. Monthly nationality rows run 2013–2025. Monthly visitor and revenue figures are only available from 2023 onward (from the monthly situation reports), and for 2025 only through July; the rows marked preliminary are the ministry’s own “p” flag and are revised when the next report appears. MOTS publishes the annual file six to nine months after the year ends, so the 2026 annual block — and the 2026 nationality split — will not exist before mid-2027. On every refresh the parser checks thousands of arithmetic identities (4,024 on the 2026-09-05 build) (months sum to quarters, quarters to years, Thai plus foreign to total, nationalities to the foreign total) and compares the “previous year” columns against the earlier publication; as of 2026-09-05 it found zero failures and zero revisions.

The dataset is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to phukettravels.com and the Ministry of Tourism and Sports; the JSON and CSV downloads below contain the complete series, including the quarters and the Thai rows that the charts leave out. Quelle: Ministerium für Tourismus und Sport Thailands, Provinzstatistik, abgerufen September 2026.