Where this stands
Two findings are already firm. The third — the one the decision actually turns on — needs another few weeks of collection.
What we know
You would not be the first AC club, or the second
Sterling Sport & Wellness opened on Sukhumvit 24 in 2026 with 5 fully air-conditioned padel courts, alongside pickleball, tennis and a recovery centre. It books through its own app, which is why it is invisible to the booking-platform sweep and absent from the original Google Maps list. Bangkok already has 12+ air-conditioned courts, not 7. Verify by phone before acting on this.
Cooling still carries an 80% premium
Baan Padel charges ฿1,800; the padel co. charges ฿1,000 and sits 1.8 km away in the same catchment. Same residents, same commute, double the price. The premium is real — but it is no longer evidence of an uncontested niche.
The top-ranked site is 740 m from the incumbent
Rama IV east ranked joint-first on rent and ceiling height, but it is 740 m from Baan Padel. That is opening opposite the market leader, not filling a gap. Kross also runs an indoor venue in the same Khlong Toei corridor. Ari / Lat Phrao remains the widest gap at 4.42 km — revised down from 5.62 once Padel Asia is counted — but the north already holds 5 courts.
Fill rate is still unknown
Break-even lands near 20% under central assumptions, but drop fill to 28% with realistic cooling costs and payback stretches from 2.4 years to 14.6. The decision is barely sensitive to rent or build cost and almost entirely sensitive to this one number.
How to read this dashboard. The venue table and the map are measured hourly from live booking data. The unmeasured venues under Market come from club websites and directories — weaker sourcing, and they carry no live prices. Demand is deliberately empty until the collector has history. Economics is your assumptions, not evidence. Method covers where all of it is weak.
The measured market
Five venues publish a machine-readable calendar. Court counts, prices and opening hours are read directly from it every hour, not from listings.
| Venue | Zone | Cooling | Courts | Hours (BKK) | Rate / hour | Nearest rival |
|---|
Known but unmeasured
These publish no machine-readable calendar, so there are no live prices or fill rates for them. Sourced from club websites and padel directories — weaker evidence than the table above, and worth confirming by phone before relying on any of it.
| Venue | Area | Courts | Cooling | Booking |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sterling Sport & Wellness | Sukhumvit 24 | 5 | Air-conditioned | Own app |
| Kross Padel Indoor | Khlong Toei / Rama IV | 3 | Indoor, AC unconfirmed | Own app |
| Kross Padel On Nut | On Nut | 3 | 2 covered, 1 open | Own app |
| Kross Padel Sky | Phrom Phong | 2 | Rooftop, open | Own app |
| Kross Padel Asoke | Asoke | 2 | Unknown | Own app |
| Pad Thai Padel | Khlong Tan | 3 | 2 indoor, 1 open | Direct |
| Padel Asia | Huai Khwang — north | 3 | Unknown | Direct |
| Bangkok Padel | Ambassador Hotel rooftop | 2 | Covered rooftop | Matchi |
| Padel Club (Playerbox) | Pathum Wan | 2 | Outdoor, floodlit | Direct |
| RSC Ratchaphruek Sports Club | Taling Chan — west | ? | Unknown | Direct |
| Beat Discovery Thailand | Bang Na | ? | Unknown | Direct |
| Unnamed court | East Bangkok (OSM) | ? | Unknown | Unknown |
Roughly 25+ courts across 12 venues outside the live feed — about 57% of Bangkok's supply. Booking-platform coverage is provably complete: all 33 clubs listed for Thailand were resolved by coordinate, and only the six above sit in greater Bangkok. The rest of the market runs on its own apps.
None appear on the map. Their addresses could not be geocoded to the precision of the measured venues — three returned no match at all — and an approximate dot sitting beside an exact one reads as equally reliable when it is not.
Where the courts are
Every venue plotted at its real coordinates. Circle area is proportional to court count. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom, click a marker for detail.
Distance to the nearest existing court
| Candidate zone | Nearest existing court | Distance | Read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ari / Lat Phrao | Padel Asia (unmeasured) | 4.42 km | Widest gap, but not empty |
| Punnawithi / Udom Suk | the padel co. | 2.09 km | Thin but open |
| Bearing | Sunshine Padel | 1.54 km | Contested |
| Rama IV east | Baan Padel (AC) | 0.74 km | Head-on with incumbent |
On distance alone the ranking in the original brief looks inverted. Rama IV east scored well on rent and ceiling height, but those are solvable problems; sitting 740 m from an established competitor is not — and Kross runs an indoor venue in the same Khlong Toei corridor.
The north is thinner than it first looked. An earlier version of this table put Ari / Lat Phrao at 5.62 km from any court, counting only booking-platform venues. Including Padel Asia — Thailand's first padel club, in Huai Khwang since 2017 — cuts that to 4.42 km. And Bel Club is itself in Huai Khwang, not Thong Lo as previously labelled. The northern arc already holds 5 courts across two venues. Ari is still the widest gap of the four by more than double, but it is not empty. Padel Asia's position is geocoded from its street address, so treat 4.42 km as ±0.5 km.
Occupancy by date and hour
The number the business case turns on, and the one nobody publishes. The collector snapshots every court hourly and infers bookings from slots that vanish before their start time.
Current occupancy — what is booked right now
Read straight from the newest snapshot across the next 8 days, so it needs no waiting. Venues that publish opening hours give an exact figure; for the rest the sellable grid has to be inferred from observed slots, which understates them until more history accumulates.
Fill rate — slots that sold before their start time
A different measurement: retrospective, and only counts slots watched from before they started until after. Slower to appear, but directly comparable between clubs.
Demand through the day
Fill rate by Bangkok hour, all days pooled. Bar width is sample size — narrow bars rest on little data.
By day of week
Weekday roll-up across every date observed.
Air-conditioned vs open air
The comparison the business case rests on. Same window, same method, pooled by cooling type.
Provisional — do not quote these yet. Faded cells rest on fewer than three observations. Slots booked before the collector first saw them are invisible, so every figure here is a floor, and the clubs with the longest booking lead times are understated most. Rankings have already reordered between days. Direction needs about a week; a trustworthy weekday/weekend split needs four to six.
How a booking is detected
Each hour the collector records every bookable slot across an 8-day horizon. A slot that stops appearing well before its own start time was booked; one still listed on the final poll before it starts went unsold. Storing one row per slot rather than per snapshot keeps six weeks at roughly 50,000 rows instead of 18 million.
Known bias: slots booked before the collector ever saw them are invisible, so early fill rates read low. That resolves as history accumulates.
What fill rate do you actually need?
Until the Demand grid fills in, fill rate is the free variable. Move it and see what the club must achieve to cover its monthly costs.
Rate is blended across peak and off-peak — ฿1,800 is Baan's peak, not an all-day price. Opex is dominated by cooling 3,000 sqm in Bangkok. Assumes 16 hours/day × 30 days and court revenue only — no coaching, retail or F&B, which established clubs lean on heavily. Undiscounted, ignores ramp-up.
The sensitivity is the finding. Holding the rate steady and moving fill from 40% to 28% with realistic cooling costs pushes payback from 2.4 years to 14.6. Rent and build cost barely move it. That is why the collector exists.
How this is collected
Every figure under Market and Location comes from the same hourly pipeline. Here is what it does and where it is weak.
Pipeline
An hourly cron polls each venue's public booking calendar across an 8-day horizon and stores one row per slot, recording when it was first and last seen free. Prices, court counts, opening hours and coordinates are read from the same source.
The collector runs on a VPS in Singapore (~25 ms from Bangkok) and writes to SQLite.
Four traps this avoids
1. Times arrive in UTC, not Bangkok time. Read as local, every club appears to open at midnight.
2. Each club has its own booking-calendar horizon, and its far edge is indistinguishable from a sellout — Baan Padel returns zero courts 21 days out. Inferring demand from far-future dates manufactures fake 100% fill rates.
3. The documented API endpoint is dead. The published one is blocked by a WAF and returns 403 even from a real browser.
4. That same WAF blocks every datacenter IP. An identical request returns 200 from a Thai residential connection and 403 from a cloud host, so the collector exits through a residential proxy.
Known gaps
Slots booked before the collector first saw them are invisible, so early fill rates read low.
Roughly 57% of Bangkok's courts publish no machine-readable calendar and are not measured. Booking-platform coverage is complete and verified by coordinate; everything beyond it comes from club websites and directories, which are unversioned and can be out of date. Sterling Sport & Wellness — five air-conditioned courts — was missed entirely by the original survey, so treat the unmeasured list as a floor, not a census.
Candidate-zone positions are approximate district centres, good to about a kilometre.
The endpoint is undocumented and may change without notice — it already has once. The residential proxy is a paid dependency; if it lapses, collection stops quietly.