Famous for its raucous nightlife, Thailand’s premier beach resort Pattaya also offers wide beaches, excellent golf courses and spas, a variety of water sports and sightseeing opportunities as well as great shopping, affordable hotels and dining experiences. No wonder so many foreigners want to travel to Pattaya and take their share of its booming real estate markets.

Popular beach city located on the coast of the Gulf of Thailand just 147 kilometers from Bangkok, Pattaya is one of the most popular beach resorts in the world. Receiving an unbelievable 5.8 million visitors a year, Pattaya is the second most popular travel destination in Thailand. Originally a small fishing village, Pattaya has developed into a large resort city with high-rise skyscrapers and mass tourism. Today, Pattaya has over 100,000 registered residents and many hundreds of thousands unregistered ones, including a large expatriate population. Most of the visitors to Pattaya come from Russia, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and East Asia.
Sights and activities in Pattaya: golf, day tours, shopping & water sports

Although renowned internationally mainly for its nightlife, Pattaya offers a myriad of activities and attractions from the beaches and water sports such as windsurfing and parasailing to golf courses, spas, water parks, shopping centers and diving and snorkeling on offshore islands. Water sports available in Pattaya include also sailing, windsurfing, kayaking, jet-skiing, paragliding and kite-sailing.

Pattaya Beach is the main beach in Pattaya area, but there are other good beaches also in Jomtien and Na Klua areas that are also more family-oriented than the nightlife-driven Central Pattaya. Golf in Pattaya is excellent with 21 golf courses available. Charter boats are available, just as a wide variety of sightseeing tours around Pattaya. There is a large water park on Jomtien Beach, a modern aquarium, as well as many smaller theme parks and zoos around Pattaya.

Shopping & entertainment. Shopping in Pattaya offers a wide variety of good value items both on street markets and in large shopping centers. There are also many massage shops and spas in Pattaya, offering pampering traditional treatments and special services such as plastic surgery. Submarine and boat cruises are organized daily, and there is also a large botanical garden near Pattaya. Other attractions in Pattaya include for example an orchid museum and Mini Siam Park, as well as several temples and viewpoints.
Pattaya travel information and practical tips

The climate in Pattaya is tropical monsoon climate with three main seasons: warm and dry season from November to February, which is the most popular time to visit Pattaya, hot and humid (but mostly rainless) season from March to May, and hot and rainy season from June to October.

Traveling to Pattaya is easy: you can either fly to Bangkok, located just 2 hours drive away from Pattaya, or try the less busy small airport south of Pattaya. There are frequent buses to Pattaya from Bangkok, as well as trains and buses from all over Thailand. Once in Pattaya, you can get around by buses, pick-up trucks called songthaews or by taxis. The majority of hotels, nightclubs, bars and shops in Pattaya Beach are within walking distance. Car rental in Pattaya is also well available in case you want to explore Thailand beyond the beach.

Visitor services. There is a great amount of hotels in Pattaya with as many as 35,000 hotel rooms available, and you can easily find accommodation suitable for your own taste and budget. The equally ubiquitous restaurants in Pattaya range from international fine dining to cheap street stalls. The nightlife in Pattaya is infamous for its connections to sex industry, but the city has been cleaned up a bit since 2004 and now you can also find many bars and nightclubs without this phenomenon. Some English is commonly spoken in the tourist areas of Pattaya.

Safety. Pattaya has higher levels of violent crime than other parts of Thailand, but this is mainly due to battles within the organized crime. For a casual visitor, petty crime such as pick-pocketing, bag snatching and scams are more common threats. Foreigners are also commonly charged more than locals for most products. Following common sense, saying no to drugs, and avoiding overly intoxication will most likely keep you out of any major trouble while in Pattaya.

                    Name Origination
There is different views and opinion where the name of Pattaya comes from. Actually when visiting the spot the first time in 1986, we did ask local fishermen in Thai language. They responded the name is originating in the strong winds which are at the start of rainy season and one of these winds they call "Pattaya"
( locally spoken Pat i Ya )

It sounds quite logic since if translated " The winds are storming is in Thai "Lom Pat Raeng"

The more modern version or which is distributed around the Net is that it is somehow a derivative of Tupphraya( Thappraya ) the general name for the area which dated back to the time when Pharaya Taksin (Duke Taksin) camped near there with the followers he had gathered to help free Thailand from the Burmese (Tupphraya - the 'Pharaya' - army). As a fact the road from Pattaya City to Jomtien Beach is called Thappraya Road

Pattaya Climate, Weather and Seasons

Pattaya's tropical wet and dry climate can traditionally be subdivided into three major seasons:

As you can see: annual average temperatures during the day do not change significantly in Pattaya, with average highs roughly between 30 and 33°C and lows between 22 and 27°C.

It is the humidity that frequently climbs up to more than 90% in the rainy season, not so much a change of temperatures, which often makes the "real feel" temperature much higher than it really is. Therefore, "cool" - in the dry and sunny winter months, roughly from November to January - is just a relative term that cannot be compared to North European standards. Even in the early winter morning hours, with a fresh breeze from the Gulf of Thailand, temperatures hardly ever sink below 20°C which - for Thai standards - can still feel uncomfortably "cool." As the humidity is rather low in these "winter months", this is also the favourite holiday season for most Western tourists, and the peak of Pattaya's traditional "high season."
Please note that, due to global climate change. these traditional seasons have become far less predictable than just a decade ago. In certain years - when there is less rainfall than usual - the city's main water reservoirs, which feed Pattaya's pipes, may sometimes almost run dry. Whereas this often causes severe water shortages around town, all larger hotels have their own water tanks, so water supply is guaranteed even in relatively dry years.

Find Your Way Around Pattaya's Main Tourist Areas
Compared with the old fishing village of the early 1960s, Pattaya in the 21st century has developed into a bustling beach resort and effectively one of Thailand's biggest cities. To find your way around Pattaya and its main tourist areas of Naklua/North Pattaya, South/Central Pattaya, Jomtien Beach and Pratamnak Hill, is still fairly simple, however, even for first-time visitors