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Every year the same thing happens. November arrives, enquiries pick up, and a business discovers its booking form has been quietly broken since June. Phuket high season marketing is mostly won or lost in October, while there is still time to fix things without the pressure of a full inbox.
If you are reading this in early October, you have about four weeks. Here is what to check on your website and your channels, in the order that makes the biggest difference.
Because a large share of high season bookings are researched and made weeks before the traveller arrives, and anything you fix in November reaches them too late. Families booking Christmas and New Year villas, and Europeans escaping winter, are often comparing options right now.
There is a technical reason too. Google needs time to recrawl pages you have changed, and advertising platforms need time to learn from new budgets and audiences. Changes made in the first week of November usually take until the middle of the month to settle, which is exactly when you want everything running at full strength.
Phuket’s high season runs roughly from November to April. The businesses that do well across those six months are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones whose website, profiles and ads were ready before the first wave arrived.
Test it on a phone, on mobile data, not on the office desktop. Most visitors will find you on a phone, often on patchy 4G in a taxi from the airport or on hotel Wi-Fi, and a site that feels fine in the office can be painfully slow in those conditions.
Run your key pages through Google PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile result. As a working target, the main content of the page should appear within about two and a half seconds. The usual culprits in Phuket are predictable:
Only if you have tested it yourself this month. Submit every form on the site, tap every WhatsApp and LINE button, and confirm that the message arrives and that someone replies. It takes twenty minutes and it is the single most valuable check on this list.
These are the failures we find most often:
Everything a visitor might check before they call you: opening hours, high season special hours, services and prices, and photos taken this year. For many Phuket businesses the Business Profile is seen by more people than the website, and it is often the first impression a visitor gets.
Replace tired photos with current ones, add any new services, and publish a short update about the season. Reply to every recent review, including the critical ones, because prospective guests read the replies as closely as the reviews. Google explains what you can edit in its Business Profile help.
Also check that your name, address and phone number match exactly across the profile, your website, Facebook and any directories. Inconsistent details weaken local rankings and confuse people.
Gradually, from the middle of October, rather than switching to full budget on 1 November. Automated bidding needs time to adjust to a new budget level, and costs rise as competitors wake up at the same moment. Starting early lets you buy attention while it is still relatively cheap.
This is also the moment to rebuild audiences for the season. The visitor mix changes through the year, so an audience that worked in July is probably wrong for December. Our guide to narrow audience targeting covers how to define who is actually booking.
One caution for Google Ads users. Its seasonality adjustments are designed for short events lasting a few days, not a six-month season, so do not rely on them to manage high season for you.
If your photos are more than a year old, probably not. Renovated rooms, a new menu, a repainted pool deck or a different view after construction next door all make old images misleading, and guests notice.
Grey monsoon skies are the other giveaway. Photos taken in the rainy season rarely sell a December holiday. Schedule a shoot on a clear morning and use the results everywhere at once: website, Business Profile, ads and social channels.
Consistency matters more than volume. The same strong images and the same message across every channel build recognition quickly, which is why we treat brand creative as part of campaign preparation rather than an afterthought.
If you want to hold each channel to account once the season starts, our guide to measuring marketing results explains which numbers to watch.
Pick up your phone, switch off Wi-Fi, and make a test enquiry on your own website as if you were a guest. Time how long it takes, note everything that annoyed you, and check the enquiry actually arrived. That one exercise usually produces the whole to-do list.
If the list turns out longer than expected, our website design and development team can fix speed and booking problems before November, and our Google Ads management can have your campaigns ramped up in time. Request a free audit and we will tell you what needs attention first.
We will audit what you are running now and hand back a written roadmap, whether or not you work with us.
