PHUKET: Getting into Phuket International Airport has never been easy. Even Vice Governor Wirawat Janpen admits to having driven past the low-key entrance more than once.

Getting out of the airport has sometimes been just as difficult. The Phuket Tourism Association's Sarayuth Mallam, who is Thai but does not look Thai, told a meeting earlier this week that he was approached by Airports of Thailand employees inside the luggage carousel collection area, offering to find a taxi for him. How kind.

Even without help, finding a taxi at Phuket airport is never a problem. Hundreds of drivers pay the extra-high rents at the airport, and pass the cost on to the tourists in excessive fares.

Finding a bus at Phuket airport is harder. Some tourists have to carry their bags to the backblocks of the car park to reach a tour bus.

Regular low-cost public buses, of the kind that one finds at every quality airport in the world?

Visitors won't find them easily on Phuket, the holiday island where a warm welcome almost always comes at an inflated cost for transport.

Phuket airport is Phuket's most important piece of infrastructure, the key to the way Phuket is presented to the world, and the gateway to Phuket's tourism future.

Sadly, Phuket's unrelenting quest for the tourist baht begins and ends at Phuket airport. So does the poor treatment of many passengers arriving and departing, along with the obvious endemic lack of control and regulation.

While many of the staff at the airport strive in extremely difficult conditions to ease the passengers' pain, Phuket's capacity for self-interest often overwhelms all their good work.

With construction of a new international terminal about to begin as the airport improves its capacity from a formal 6.5 million passengers a year to 12.5 million, Phuket is being presented with its best chance yet to flip over a new leaf.

There are some hopeful signs. Phuket Vice Governor Wirawat said at this week's airport meeting that the poles along the road outside the airport should be reduced to carrying essential cables, not burdened with obsolete lines that are no longer functional.

Extra vehicle parking space will be set aside at Phuket airport before November and next high season. More efficient processing through more Immigration counters has already been promised, too.

Yet what the reshaping of the airport really demands is for the Phuket authorities to seize this once-only opportunity to correct some of the gigantic and costly mistakes of the past.

To build a new international terminal while at the same time preserving the old Phuket public transport system, based on greed and the quick fix, would be to consign Phuket within 10 or 15 years to tourism's garbage bin.

If when the shiny new terminal opens sometime in 2014 there are new public bus routes running from the airport to Surin and Kamala, to Patong and Kata-Karon and to Chalong Circle, as suggested by Phuket's Transport Director, Phuket will a different place.

Phuket will for the first time be a tourism destination with a secure future. Let's hope this golden opportunity is grabbed, for Phuket's sake.