Days in the Life of a Pattaya Hotel Owner

When 2002 had come and gone and 2003 was ebbing away with no completion date in site I became, not surprisingly, somewhat agitated. I had enough on my plate back in England, I was now living apart from my wife and children and this extra problem was one more than I needed. I recall a rather defining telephone conversation with the developers Managing Director from whom I was trying to secure an approximate completion date. We had long since fired the developers from working on our buildings but we needed them to sign off on the completion so that we could register the property and have the electric and water supplies connected. Having failed to get anywhere Jin passed the phone to me and I duly inquired as to the approximate date that the completion papers could be signed. The MD simply told me “Soon”.

“Soon? What does soon mean?” I enquired politely although I was braced already for a difficult conversation.

“Soon”

“Yes, soon, I see, but soon to you may mean something different than it does to me so can you be more precise, please?”

“Yes……Soon”

“No, just saying soon is not good enough. I need you to be a little more forthcoming. I do not expect you to give me an exact date but simply an idea, I will not hold you to anything but by SOON do you mean next week, next month, three months time or when?”

“Soon”

“Listen to me you stupid p***k. You just saying SOON is really starting to piss me off. I have to draw down funds, I have to arrange for the money to be transferred from the U.K. I need to know how long I have to send money over to support my family before we can start generating an income. Please just give me a clue and I NEED MORE THAN BLOODY SOON!”

“Soon”

“F**k Off!!!!!”

‘Soon’ in fact turned out to be September, 2004, approximately fourteen months after my conversation with the developers MD! Although I did not realise it at the time that telephone conversation was my first lesson in how different doing business was going to be here than in the West. We fortunately managed to do a deal with our neighbours and the utility companies that enabled us to partially open in July 2003. This ‘soft opening’ gave us the opportunity to identify faults and we closed the hotel down for a few months in mid-2004 to rectify these in advance of our official Grand Opening the coming October.