Kimpton signs 150-key Natai Beach resort in Phang Nga, opening 2028

IHG Hotels & Resorts confirmed on 5 August 2026 that it has signed Kimpton Phang-Nga Natai Beach, a new-build resort of 150 guestrooms, suites and villas set to open in 2028. It will be the first Kimpton in Phang Nga, placing one of the group’s most design-led luxury-lifestyle brands on the sand of Thailand’s Andaman coast.

The resort is being developed in partnership with Natai Venture Co., Ltd., with Capstone Asset as shareholder and developer. That it is a ground-up commission matters more than it might sound. Kimpton’s character has always depended on the interplay between architecture, public space and service — the way a lobby bar reads at six in the evening, how far the walk is from a villa to the water — and a resort drawn from scratch allows those decisions to be made early, in the plan rather than in the retrofit. Guests arriving in 2028 will be seeing the brand’s coastal thinking as it was originally intended.

The address is Natai Beach, on the Phang Nga coast, and the practical detail that will interest most travellers is the transfer: 20 minutes from Phuket International Airport. That is a meaningful number in a region where the good beaches frequently sit at the far end of an hour or more of coastal road. It puts a long-haul arrival within a short drive of a check-in, and it makes Natai a credible base for the kind of trip that begins with a morning flight and ends with an unhurried afternoon rather than a transfer schedule.

The programme is broad enough to hold a full stay. IHG has confirmed multiple dining concepts alongside beach and lobby bars, a spa, swimming pools, a fitness centre, a kids’ club and function spaces. The mix reads as a resort built for several audiences at once — families who need somewhere for children to spend the middle of the day, couples who want a beach bar with an evening of its own, and the small-group and event business that a property of this size will want to fill its shoulder seasons.

Kimpton is no longer a novelty in Thailand. The brand already operates Kimpton Kitalay Samui and Kimpton Maa-Lai Bangkok, and its pipeline extends to Bangkok, Chiang Rai, Hua Hin, Khao Yai and Pattaya. Natai Beach therefore arrives as part of a deliberate national spread across island, capital, upcountry and coastal settings — enough of a footprint that a returning traveller could build an itinerary within a single brand and still encounter genuinely different properties along the way.

For IHG, the signing is the second in Phang Nga Province, following InterContinental Phang Nga Bay Resort. The group currently operates 42 hotels across 11 brands in Thailand, with 39 more in the pipeline — a portfolio deep enough to suggest that Phang Nga is being treated as a destination in its own right, with two distinct luxury propositions rather than one flagship and a gap. The province has long been visited on day trips from Phuket; two branded resorts of this calibre change the calculation for anyone deciding where to actually sleep.

There is a longer-range factor worth holding in mind. The upcoming Andaman International Airport in Phang Nga, targeted for 2032, is expected to lift regional connectivity further. A resort opening in 2028 would spend its first years drawing on Phuket’s arrivals before a second gateway comes into play — a sequence that tends to favour early guests, who get the property in its quieter, more attentive first seasons.

What a discerning traveller should take from this is a planning note more than a booking one. Nothing here is reservable yet, and 2028 remains some way off. But Natai Beach is now firmly on the map for the second half of this decade, and anyone who has watched the Andaman coast grow busier will recognise the value of a design-forward beachfront resort that sits 20 minutes from a major airport and has been drawn from the ground up. It is worth keeping a line in the diary.

Source: IHG