about The Beachfront Club
The Beachfront Club Company Limited is registered in Hong Kong with its address at Suite D, 16th Floor, On Hing Building, 1-9 On Hing Terrace, Central, Hong Kong. The company has shareholders from China, U.K., Australia, Argentina and Thailand.
The site was conceived and founded by a career photographer and publisher, John Everingham, and a hotelier with a career of experience in tropical beach resorts, Chris Ryan. Both are Australian citizens and long-term residents of Southeast Asia, and close friends since 1982.
The Beachfront Club website was built on USA- and UK-based servers by an international team of code-writers, with the bulk of the code being produced in Russia and the Americas.
The Beachfront Club now has representatives for sales and marketing in some regions of the world and will appoint more in the coming year. The Beachfront Club (Thailand) Company Limited is a national-level partner set up to operate The Club's systems within Thailand and to provide contracted services, particularly Sales & Marketing and Customer Support to the parent company.
mission statement
This exclusive Club was created by people who live in awe of the beauty of nature, and recognise that special interface between land and sea called 'beach' as one of the highest of earth's many amazing creations. We link this natural world with the very latest internet technology through an interface that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago.
This new-era combination of natural world, traditional hotel and travel business and digital technology is dedicated to helping visitors find true beachfront hotels around the world with ease, and to helping member hotels make contact with more future guests. We aim to provide these services in as democratic a manner as possible, displaying small, budget bungalows on remote and little-known beaches as well as top, world-class resorts in famous destinations. Visitors from all walks of life should be able to find accommodations most suited to them. Right on the beach. is the ruling criteria.
With so many of our member hotels situated on beautiful islands and in spectacular beach locations it is only natural for us to aim for the highest visual standards, and for this we have created a special club-within-a-club for photography, The Skylight Club. Similarly, we aim for high standards in our written content. We will continue to introduce innovations like our beach ratings, sand photos, romance elements, use of wiki functions and tag clouds plus new community functions.
More than just make a business from beaches, tourism and technology we are dedicated to the promotion of better understanding of the natural environments we use and abuse. We wish to use this site as a knowledge base for learning about beach and ocean environments. We wish to be instrumental in encouraging long-term preservation of beach environments, natural treasures we inherited and which we are morally bound to leave for our children in as unspoiled a condition as possible.
Finally, we hope to have lots of fun ourselves on the many different beaches along our journey, while making both friends and money, and hopefully leaving the world in a little better condition than that in which we found it.
JE & CR
our maps
The Beachfront Club's maps were created using a wide range of tools and technologies, and thorough research, to achieve an unprecedented degree of accuracy in our outlines of beachfront hotels. These tools include aerial photography, GPS waypoints, satellite images, printed maps and plain old walking and mapping the beaches ourselves.
Many people have been surprised to see that we are able to accurately draw hotel boundaries even where the satellite image below is poor in quality, is old and outdated or shows only clouds.
We know there will be mistakes, and invite users to send us information or corrections when they find them. Where we have missed a hotel that qualifies as true beachfront please send us the most detailed information you can. We still have about 1,000 names of candidate hotels that we are still trying to locate and verify.
the founders
John Everingham - a brief professional biography
See John's blog
Though an Australian citizen, John Everingham has spent all of his adult life in Southeast Asia after arriving here aged 17 to begin his second life adventure, an overland motorcycle trip to Europe. He had just completed his first big adventure, a year working in Papua-New Guinea, to finance the trip.
The Vietnam War was still raging across Indochina at the time he was motorcycling through Laos and Cambodia, and soon after making a side trip to Saigon as a tourist, John began putting his camera to work professionally. As he became engrossed in photography and the war, the overland trip to Europe was delayed time and again. Add to this his fascination with the people and cultures of Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, plus marriage to a Laotian woman, and his arrival in London dragged on for some 23 years.
After the Vietnam War John was working in Vientiane, Laos, for BBC radio and the Far Eastern Economic Review, among others. For two years he was the only Western correspondent allowed to remain the newly 'liberated' countries of Indochina. Communist authorities there believed, mistakenly, that his publishing many photos of villages bombed out by American and allied aircraft during the war years indicated he was a communist sympathiser. Those two-years came to an abrupt end in 1977 when he was arrested at gun point, charged with being a CIA spy, jailed for a short spell, and then expelled across the Mekong River into Thailand.
Bangkok then became home, and still is today. He spent a brief time as Southeast Asian Correspondent for The Australian newspaper before returning to his real passion, photography. For ten years he worked for magazines around the world, including well-known publications like National Geographic, The Smithsonian, International Wildlife, GEO and others.
In 1979 John opened an Indian restaurant with well known Bengali chef Cha Cha. This small establishment, Himali Cha Cha, became one of Bangkok's best know restaurants for fifteen years until the death of his partner.
In 1989 John launched a magazine of his own, PHUKET Magazine, a high-end tourism production that would help make this island famous. This was followed by the launch of Bangkok Airways first in-flight magazine, Fah Thai in 1990, and a series of other magazines through the 1990s. Those included Sea Yachting and Asia-Pacific TROPICAL HOMES. John's photography had to be directed to filling those publications, forcing him to become something of a mass-production photographer for many years.
His first marriage produced two sons, Ananda - now a well-known actor in Thailand - and Chester, currently an engineering student at the University of Queensland. His second marriage to a Chinese wife produced his third son, Zennith.
The decline of print media and the rise of the internet kept John focused on web technology. When the great tsunami of 2004 hit Phuket, his tourism-based publishing business almost sunk too. He began writing detailed plans for a number of interactive web businesses that he had been mulling over the years. One of those plans, The Beachfront Club, was offered to the Singapore-based conglomerate that took over his magazines in 2007. They ignored it.
At the end of 2008 John and his old friend of nearly 30 years, Chris Ryan, resolved to turn The Beachfront Club into reality. This turned out to be the perfect partnership for such a venture: Chris was a career hotelier with extensive experience in beach resorts across the region, and hotel marketing. John had extensive experience in photography, publishing, hotels and tourism. This became the winning team to launch this innovative, interactive business with its roots in hotel marketing, publishing, photography - and in their extensive networks of contacts across Southeast Asia.
Who is Chris Ryan?
Chris was probably somehow destined for the foreshores of the world. One of his very first career postings, in the late seventies, found him running the catering facility in a mining town in the far reaches of northwestern Australia. This remote town just happened to be right on the coast where the sea water felt like a warm bath. He'd crossed the deserts of Australia in a broken-down old VW Beetle, seeking new horizons, then wound up catering to hordes of hungry miners under the scorching sun. His journey had begun.
It wasn't long before Chris was intrigued by the exotic lure of Asia. After a few years of back-packing, throughout Southeast Asia, stints in English teaching and working as a translator on foreign film sets, he settled back into his preordained career trail in hospitality. Having graduated in Hotel Management from William Angliss in Melbourne a few years before the travel bug bit, a career in hotels was clearly his fated path.
Thailand became his home base in the early eighties, and his first role in senior management was in Chiang Mai, in the northern hills. After creating his first small business, running English language training programmes for the reception staff at a well-known 4 star property in town, he was offered a role as their Food & Beverage Manager. Being the only foreigner on staff, he had to learn the Thai language, quickly.
His next posting took him south to Phuket, as Assistant Manager of the Coral Beach Hotel, now a member of the Amari group; followed by some years in Hua Hin & Pattaya with Royal Garden Resorts. Then, in 1990, he was back in Phuket - this time with a young family in tow - for two years as Hotel Manager at the Pearl Village Resort.
After working as the General Manager of a couple of busy beachfront properties in Koh Samui for a while, he joined an Australian-based group, Southern Pacific Hotels. This took him to Bangkok and Sydney, before bringing him back to Asia as the opening General Manager of the Park Royal Resort in Bali, circa 1995. This was a perfectly located, low-rise resort property on the sandy shores of Sanur. This role involved a major renovation and relaunch under a new brand, a job that constantly presented new marketing challenges and creative opportunities.
Sadly, in the late nineties, political chaos across Indonesia and the Asia-wide financial crisis hit tourism very badly, and many expatriates in the region were affected, Chris included. After five years in Bali he and his family relocated to the Philippines as the Country Manager for Century International Hotels.
Next, in 2001, it was onto Kuala Lumpur for 4 years with the Park Plaza group. In Malaysia he was in charge of Operations & Development for their properties throughout Southeast Asia. This job had him pursuing new development opportunities throughout the region. Then, in late 2004, that evolved into the establishment of his own hotel management & development consultancy firm.
This was first based in Kuala Lumpur, then moved north so he could work out of his home base in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Here he resettled to be closer to family - his wife and two teenage children. They then established a small, family-run property brokerage firm.
Co-founding The Beachfront Club with long-time publisher friend, John Everingham, in December, 2008, was really just a natural extension of his life's experiences to date... travel & tourism, hotels and resorts, beaches, creative marketing, new cultures, languages & new discoveries. This became his first venture into the fast-evolving world of interactive web, and a whole new exciting challenge in life.