A few of you have noticed that we use Phuket Town and Phuket City interchangeably on this website. So what’s the deal with that? Why not stick with one and not the other? For years, the area was known as Phuket Town. In fact, most of the signs in Phuket still refer to the place as Phuket Town. Guidebooks and maps still mention Phuket Town and even some who live in Phuket still use Phuket Town.

However, in 2004, the area was elevated to city status (thesaban nakhon in Thai). What was once called Phuket Town all of a sudden became Phuket City. The transition between the two names still causes much confusion because the area has the feeling more of a town than a city.

The reason why you will find Phuket Town and Phuket City on this website is because people use both and therefore people search the Internet for both terms. If we were to only use one and not the other, we’d eliminate about half the people searching for the area through websites such as Google.

Sure, it would tidy the website up a bit, but we’d miss out on a lot of traffic.

We actually prefer to use the official term, Phuket City, but we still use Phuket Town here and there in an attempt to maximize the number of visitors to Phuket Vogue who may come here searching for Phuket Town nightlife or Phuket City restaurants.