Sumi Soorian

SENIOR ADVISOR, PHUKET HOTELS ASSOCIATION

Sumi Soorian joined the leadership team of the Phuket Hotels Association at its inception in 2016 as Development Director. A US-graduate, she boasts vast experience working in various countries including Australia, China, and Thailand.

Sumi is a remarkable marketing and communications professional specializing in project management. She is now applying her expertise in developing the reputation of Phuket, as well as investing in the key asset of Thai hospitality – the amazing people we all love the Land of Smiles for.

Across eight years with the Phuket Hotels Association, Sumi Soorian saw the rise and abrupt fall of the island’s hospitality industry from up-close. She has also been a first-hand witness to its remarkable recovery.

Sumi brings her considerable professional experience to the Phuket Hotels Association, being in charge of its development – effectively of changing, or rather developing, attitudes. She observes that Phuket’s post-COVID-19 tourism industry is one with more variety and diversity than ever.

The lifestyle had already been changing before the pandemic, and now we re-ignited those changes. In the culinary scene, Michelin came to Phuket, and now I see a lot of elevation in the FnB sector, a lot of up-and-coming young Thai chefs, a lot of international food.

Also evident is the development of the wellness and beauty sector. Clinics and studios are opening; Phuket is evolving into a medical hub. That is where we were heading before COVID, and now we speed up.

All this changes the social landscape of Phuket and the demographic. I think even the seasonality has changed! We see a very different crowd now; the people moving into Phuket are different.

Started by a group of inspiring hospitality professionals, the Phuket Hotels Association now includes over 90 member hotels and resorts, and Sumi has been involved since its early days. It is a non-profit organization made up of like-minded hoteliers, turning their shared expertise to three main goals: protecting Phuket’s environment, supporting its local community through education and training, and developing its global image as a tourism destination.

– I’ve been in Phuket for over 10 years. When I first came, I was a full-time mother, and my involvement in the Phuket Hotels Association began through volunteering for a local schools’ fundraising event when a similar opportunity arose within the association, I jumped at it instantly. In short, that’s how PHAB was formed – Phuket Hotels Association Benefit, an annual fundraiser that supports educational scholarships for the local Thai community in realising their dreams.

My first position with the association was managing events both educational, environmental, and others. The Phuket Hotels Association has Education, Marketing, and Sustainability as their key pillars, and has recently added Governance and Membership.

Our beach cleanups and environmental workshops are part of our regular environmental efforts, not to mention our annual largest hospitality sustainability event PHIST – Phuket Hotels for Islands Sustaining Tourism.

The PHAB events are for the education part. A lot of the fundraising money goes into education scholarships and training for local Thai youngsters who want to study hospitality and tourism.

As an association, we can look at a bigger picture because we have the power of influence. We’ve got the numbers, the brands; the expertise and resources combined. They’re no longer seen as competitors but cooperators. It’s a powerful network indeed.

For Sumi, the turning point in Phuket’s history was the island’s return from the COVID-19 pandemic. The lockdowns decimated the hospitality industry, but its remarkable recovery presented a lot of opportunities to make the industry more sustainable for the long term.

We will also keep working on making Phuket a city of sustainability, a smart city. The return of people, tourists, and residents has accelerated all the development.

The Phuket Sandbox scheme really re-introduced the island to a lot of people that otherwise wouldn’t have considered it as a place to visit or to call home.

Also, indicative is that we are having more schools and more hospitals. We are having more airlift with new airlines and new routes linking Phuket with different destinations around the globe. And now, you know, they’re gonna add more yacht marinas, so the boating industry is also on the rise.

Meanwhile, many Thai community fill in the gaps for what we never had before in Phuket, like re-inventing local dining and showcasing it to tourists. I think this has also come with the migration right together with the skill sets brought to the island by the new wave of Thai residents coming to cater to tourists. I think this is what has been much needed.

Personnel is one of the most important assets for hotels. Khun Sumi strongly believes in Thai people being the strongest point of Thai hospitality. By greeting you by name, by remembering you and your preferences, these people build your experience and memories of the place where you stay.

The country is renowned for human-related aspects of hospitality – the service, the expertise, the knowledge. You may not remember what you ate on a given day, but you remember how people made you feel in general. Hospitality workers in Thailand always go above and beyond; they do more than they should. That’s what wins hearts.

It all rests on people, and this is why we need to have the best employees only, as this is what makes service consistent.

And as Thailand boasts the best service in the world, keeping the benchmark is really a challenge! People need to further their education and training so they can skill up to better help the industry. It’s not about the benefits for this or that hotel; it is about the image of Thai hospitality and Thai tourism.

Career development may start as early as school or preschool, even if it is not formally viewed as such. You may call it nurturing a good attitude, but isn’t personal attitude the essence of professional attitude?

– We start from a very young age, actually. For the environment-focused part, we have a green garden school project that involves local school children, and there are already three schools where they have such gardens with our member hotels’ support! We help children grow up with an understanding that the Earth and our environment is important, gender equality is important.

But please don’t limit this education part to young children only. After the pandemic, when old seasoned professionals left for other jobs, we have seen a new generation come in. They don’t have enough skills, they’re lacking experience, and there are many of them. So even here again, it circles back to education and training. We partner with international education providers like Cornell, Dusit Thani College, AIMS and LaRoche. We partner with the Prince of Songkha University’s Phuket Campus (PSU), Rajabhat University and the Phuket Vocational College and more.

We view these students as future hospitality professionals. First, they do their hospitality and tourism courses, and after that, we provide internships at our member hotels so they get an opportunity to work in the field.

They get paid for their work; there are mentorship programs for them to grow. Our GMs, our HR, take a lot of students to mentor them, to guide them through the training. Internship is critically important because it’s real work experience and a chance to build your own experience and skill set.

There are high volume of Thai students going through internships every year, as each of the Phuket Hotels Association member hotels and many others have all sorts of individual courses and partnership programs with Thai and foreign educational institutions. What is lacking is a “one-stop shop” for a teenager willing to dive into the amazing world of Phuket hospitality. Yet there are trade fairs and hotel HR departments which can be contacted directly.

Hotel chains have large recruitment for interns, do community service, provide educational workshops. They do it continuously all year round. As the work has started years ago and even Phuket Hotels Association is now eight years old, some of those interns now have positions in hospitality management.

At one of the recent events, I met one of my ex-students, once a shy girl – who is now all confident, speaks really good English, works at a hotel chain, and actually does events just as I do! It is really amazing how they turn out to be very, you know, confident.

The development of English skills is particularly impressive and indicative. When we interview our future interns, their English is very limited most of the time. And still, some of them are very brave. They’re very upfront; they’re very courageous in asking questions.