The Hideout was named a Finalist in the Best Sustainable Hotel - Rest of World category at the 2025 Travelling for Business Awards, recognition for the tiny Thai eco-retreat proving that the lightest footprint can leave the deepest impression.
Hidden in the jungle hills of Koh Yao Noi - the sleepy island floating between
Phuket and Krabi in the heart of
Phang Nga Bay - The Hideout consists of just a handful of Thai-style treehouse lodges, their palm-leaf roofs barely visible among the canopy, gazing over one of Southeast Asia's most celebrated seascapes. Built from materials sourced on the island itself and powered by renewable energy, the retreat pursues small-scale luxury of the most deliberate kind: open-air living, farm-to-table and zero-waste dining, and the removal of modern distraction as a feature rather than a compromise.
The philosophy is the product. Days pass between hammock, solar-filtered pool and longtail excursions across the bay; the kitchen works with the island's farmers and fishermen; and staff drawn from the local community give the place its familial warmth while keeping the retreat's benefits rooted where they belong. For the burnt-out founders and screen-saturated executives of this readership, The Hideout has quietly become the definitive digital detox - the place where doing nothing is the entire, restorative point, in a country whose blend of
business and mindfulness this title has often championed.
Voters responded to the purity of it. In a category that spans engineering marvels and grand estates, The Hideout represents sustainability at its most elemental: build small, build local, live within the island's means, and let the jungle do the rest.
The 2025 title went to Svart in Norway, with The Hideout shortlisted alongside Adrère Amellal in Egypt - three radically different answers to the same question of how hospitality can belong to its landscape.
Practicalities keep the escape honest: the island sits under an hour by longtail from
both Phuket and Krabi, yet mass tourism has passed it by, leaving rice paddies, rubber plantations and a Muslim fishing culture of unhurried warmth. The Hideout channels guests' stays into community projects and local employment, rainwater and solar systems carry the load lightly, and air conditioning is gloriously absent by design - the sea breeze was always the better engineer.
As the Travelling for Business Awards look towards 2026, The Hideout remains the small idea with the big lesson: paradise works best untouched.
