Royal Garden Plaza Pattaya

Minor Group opened Royal Garden Plaza in 1993 as Pattaya’s first shopping mall, built adjacent to the Royal Garden Hotel (now the Pattaya Marriott Resort & Spa) on the full block between Beach Road and Pattaya Second Road. The property became known throughout the city for its most distinctive architectural feature: a red airplane appearing to burst from the building’s Second Road facade, housing a flight-simulator attraction tied to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum on the third floor.

At roughly 50,000 sqm of total building area across four floors, though owner Minor Group reports a smaller net leasable area of around 22,000 sqm, Royal Garden Plaza pioneered what local guides call Pattaya’s “entertainment mall” format, combining international retail brands with family attractions rather than treating shopping and entertainment as separate draws. Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, Ripley’s Haunted Adventure, Ripley’s Infinity Maze and Louis Tussaud’s Waxworks anchor the entertainment floor, alongside Food Wave, a sea-view food court seating roughly 400 people on the top level.

Boots and Watsons anchor the beauty and pharmacy floor, with Adidas and Puma carrying sportswear and a cluster of independent fashion boutiques filling the ground and first floors. Tops anchors grocery, and a growing cluster of tattoo studios and, more recently, licensed cannabis retailers have joined the tenant mix on the property’s lower levels, reflecting Pattaya’s particular tourist-retail character.

That entertainment-mall template, still fundamentally unchanged since 1993 even as Central Festival Pattaya Beach has since overtaken it in scale, has kept Royal Garden Plaza positioned as a legacy, mid-scale option in Pattaya’s retail landscape: smaller than the newer competition, but distinguished by attractions no other Pattaya mall carries.