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November to February: full
Dry, breezy, mid-twenties at night, and every hotel, table and stage-side seat in the town taken by nine. The best weather and the earliest arrivals. Christmas and New Year sit in the middle of it.
What the seasons do to a hall with a roof
Most of what people mean by high season and low season in Pattaya is about the outdoors: the beach, the pavement bars, the rooftops, the sea. A steel hall with the air-conditioning on at twenty degrees does not have a low season in that sense. The rain does not come in. The heat does not come in. The band plays six nights in August as in January. What changes is who is in the room, how early the tables go, and how long the walk from the gate to the stage takes on a Saturday.
November to February is the crowd. The flights from Europe and Australia fill, the retired regulars who winter here arrive in October and leave in March, and the hall is full to the middle bars on every band night. The stage-side tables go by seven on Fridays and Saturdays and by half past on the other four. This is the season the bar was built for and the season it is at its loudest. It is also the season with the most people asking where it is, which is why the location guide exists.
March to May is the heat, and the heat is the argument. Outside, thirty-five degrees at nine at night and no wind. Inside, twenty. The hall in April is the most obvious reason to choose it over every open-fronted bar in the city, and Songkran in the middle of it fills the room with people who came in to dry off and stayed for the band. The tables go a little later than in January. The counter is where most people end up, because the cold is at its most noticeable there.
The rain, and the regulars
June to October is the rain, and the rain in Pattaya is not what northern Europeans imagine. It comes in the late afternoon or the evening, hard, for an hour, and then it stops and the streets steam. A bar with a roof has the one hour of the day when every open-fronted bar in the city is losing its customers, and the gate on Soi Diana fills with people who were on Soi Buakhao when it started. The hall is at its emptiest in September and its most local: the regulars who live here year round have the room to themselves, and the Thursday table is a Thursday table again rather than a queue.
If you want the front row on a Friday without a race, come in low season. The band is the same band, the pour is the same pour, and the singer has time in the breaks to talk. If you want the hall at its loudest and fullest, with the whole of northern Europe in it, come in January and be at the gate at seven. The only wrong month is the one that has you outside at nine in April wondering why nobody told you.
The one thing the seasons do not change is the schedule. Six to three, seven days, live band from nine to 1 AM, band Tuesday to Sunday and the DJ Monday, and the tables along the stage edge first come. Every page on this site says that because it is true in every month, and because it is the thing the season pages on other sites, which are built around what the weather does, do not say.