Do ‘beachfront’ hotels really mislead their guests?

Jan. 2, 2011 - PRLog -- It was about 1991, but it might have happened yesterday – and it will surely happen again tomorrow.  I was in a boat, some 500 metres off shore in Patong Bay, Phuket with a 500mm lens – that’s one long, long telephoto lens.  When I focused on the Phuket Palace, a brand new, high-rise apartment-hotel situated an even greater distance back from the beach, the telephoto effect sandwiched everything in view.  Suddenly the beach, trees and towering building were flattened.  The 700 metres from beach to building virtually disappeared in the images that I clicked.  The high-rise appeared to be parked in the trees right at the back of the beach.  

Those disappearing 700 metres in my photo came to cause grief and financial loss for many people in the following years, it turned out.  That photo ended up in a court of law, used as evidence in bitter legal dispute as evidence of the developer’s calculated intent to deceive.  

After shooting and delivering the image to the delighted developer he then placed it prominently in his advertising on the back cover of PHUKET Magazine, a high-end tourism publication of which I was the publisher.  Though I was both the photographer of the image and the publisher of the magazine helping to sell this out-of-place high-rise as ‘beachfront’, I did not think it was such a big deal at the time.  And, I believe, I pushed aside the publisher’s eternal struggle between money and conscience with simplistic justifications, telling myself that ‘people would not really be fooled.’

Yet many were fooled, and the developer ended up in that bitter court struggle, lost it, and fled Thailand forever.  My photo that ‘lost’ the 700 metres between reality and magazine, first helped him make duplicitous sales then later helped convict him of intended fraud.
Did it make me think?  Certainly.  Perhaps that was the very first seed of an idea that would one day sprout and grow into The Beachfront Club.  

Patong Beach had many more lessons of the ‘beachfront’ kind.  Do reputable, ‘brand’ hotels selling rooms to innocent tourists from afar employ similar, misleading tactics?  
A little later, about 1993, I was down on Patong Beach once again with my camera, shooting brochure photos for a well-known ‘beachfront’ hotel.  I was setting up the desired beach-to-hotel shot, under the direction of the hotel manager.  He was directing, moving cars and motorcycles off the road in front of his hotel.   Everyone who has been to this famous resort beach knows that a very busy road cuts a prominent swathe between beach and the hotels here.

Without a vehicle in view, and me on the beach just below road level, my camera saw beach, trees and hotel.  The road had effectively disappeared.  Click.  Again, the perfect shot.  The hotel manager was so pleased with this ‘roadless’ shot of his ‘beachfront’ hotel that it remained prominent on the hotel’s brochures for many years.  Did a photo of the road ever make it into that hotel’s brochure?  Never.  While writing this I did a quick check of the same hotel’s website; among over 30 photos of the hotel not one gives even a hint that a major road separates hotel and beach.  Is omission also a form of deception?
It matters little that I cannot mention the name of this particular hotel, because most along both Patong’s and Karon’s beach roads employ the same tactics of omission.  But does omitting all references to a busy, noisy road between a hotel and the beach constitute ‘misleading advertising’.  Many of those who get fooled by it believe it is misleading or worse.  During 20 years of publishing magazines in Phuket I heard uncountable complaints from disappointed, sometimes angry, tourists, about it.  More seeds for The Beachfront Club.

Perhaps my being a founder of The Beachfront Club is a way for me to expunge my subconscious guilt and complicity in this unfair game?  I know that my 1991 photograph that lost 700 metres caused others serious financial loss and distress.  I’ll never know how much disappointment my photo of that Patong hotel ‘right on the beach’ caused.  And I did many other shots like it for other hotels.  It is standard practice for hotel managers to instruct the photographer to hide or cut out the ugly and unwanted, or when that is not sufficient, to ‘Photoshop’ the images to take out ugly street wires, neighbouring buildings and more.  Yet the most common retouch of all is to replace the murky water at a dull beach with the turquoise stuff from Tahiti or paradise.  

While I no longer do hotel photo shoots, a quick glance through hotel websites shows that the retouching business is alive and brighter than ever; as is the sly habit of omission, as is the liberal use of the word ‘beachfront’ by hotels that are on the wrong side of a road, or worse.

The Beachfront Club promises to help millions of people avoid the many pitfalls in discovering true beachfront hotels.  I’m hoping it will be many times more than the number of people my photographs may have once helped dupe.

www.thebeachfrontclub.com

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The Beachfront Club is both an exclusive hotel club and the new global authority on all ‘true beachfront’ hotels of the world. The Club certifies beachfront hotels that meet its strict criteria with all levels of accommodation, from budget to 5-star.