Centra Masters fun times
Caddies for instance, are a treat. Each player has a
pleasant and knowledgeable sidekick for the entire
four rounds dotingly attending to your every need on
the course. After a few holes, helping you with club
selection and always reading putts are second nature.
Everyone is “Absolutely spoiled.” Peter describes the
organic nature of Thai service as, “Humbling compared
to any other country.”
As a bonus many of the players are over 50+, retired or
semi-retired, and return year after year cultivating new
lifelong friends.
It was a special pleasure to be escorted around by
the affable Ian Morgan, Hua Hin General Manager for
Golfasian. He is a font of knowledge, always on call
and ready to solve any issue big or small that gets sent
his way. He is proactive in a way that this astonishingly
organized operation demands. He cares about the
details in a way that only a man who loves his job would.
Again, “Advantage Guest!”
I have to say it was a great convenience to have a
manned Golfasian desk, club storage and rental, and van
pickup point unobtrusively located just off the main
entrance. As with all things Centara, it quietly blends
with the elegant colonial décor where if you were not
a golfer, you wouldn’t notice the discrete operation
purring along in close proximity.
THE HOTEL
According to the hotel, the Centara Grand Beach Resort
& Villas Hua Hin is the original Railway Hotel built in
1923 for Thai and visiting royalty and restored to its old
colonial glory. It is set among tropical gardens on a 4
mile beach in the center of Hua Hin.
Time for a pic with caddies
It was originally named the Railway Hotel, built along
the classic lines of that era, then quite sensitively
extended and renovated. The result was a charmingly
retained air of a bygone age with a touch of elegance.
Although it is in the center of the little town, it
feels nestled into the beachfront behind shaded
whitewashed walls, hiding from the outside, a lovely
expanse of breeze kissed, topiary rich gardens.
(About a 5 Star experience)
Star ratings for hotels have been misused and abused
for many years and particularly since the advent of
internet bookings and ratings. Various opinions on
the subject could be encyclopedic in their recording.
Which is a long way of saying I typically eschew
describing a place with the fuzzy classifications of star
ratings. A 5 Star in an economically emerging world can
be very different than in say, a grand hotel in Western
Europe. Not that I consider Thailand “emerging.”
So that said, and not having been to a Grand Hotel in
Europe for a while, I will now gush a bit.
I do a bit of travelling around this part of the world
and have an appreciation for craftsmanship. There are
a lot of pretty places around here but even some of
the high-end hotels lack in fine details that to me, leave
you with the kind of undefined feeling of privileged
contentment that a real luxury facility can offer. I
have been accused of being a little too detail focused,
and the truth is I appreciate a perfectly mitered bit of
molding or a skillfully varnished and polished stair rail.
Yes the kind of thing most people would look right past
but it is those little attentions, which if not consci