Destinations known | Has Thailand had enough of Western tourists and their ‘entitlement’?
- Once the mainstay of the Thai tourism industry, visitors from Europe, the US and Australia are now outnumbered
- Arrivals from the rest of Asia and the Middle East tend to spend more on a daily basis, but their stays are shorter
Thailand needs tourism. The industry that brings travellers to the country’s beaches, back alleys and Buddhist temples employed almost 6 million people, raked in US$109.5 billion and accounted for one in every five baht spent in 2018, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council.
But, according to a recent post on the website Pattaya Unplugged, which claims to be “the Number One Tourist info source in Pattaya”, the Land of Smiles is faking its warm welcome when it comes to visitors from the West.
The snappily titled opinion piece (“Ten reasons why Western foreign tourists are not wanted as badly by the Thai Tourism Ministry versus Indians, Chinese, Russians, Koreans, etc.”) catalogues why the Southeast Asian nation doesn’t care for Western visitors – understood here to mean those hailing from Europe, North America and Australia. Compiled by an American living in Pattaya, those reasons were gleaned from “many talks with people from many different backgrounds and cultures [...] not just the view from a barstool”.
Some points the writer makes are close to correct, if horribly elucidated. Ignoring the subtext of in-group superiority in the statement, “There are simply more of them then [sic] us”, statistics show that Thailand does receive significantly more non-Western arrivals than Western ones. According to Ministry of Tourism & Sports data, 27.3 million of the nation’s visitors in 2019 came from East Asia (including Southeast Asia), with 2.4 million from South Asia, while Europe, the Americas and Oceania accounted for 6.7 million, 1.6 million and 900,000, respectively.
Similarly, “We often don’t spend as much as people think” has some truth to it. In 2017, Chinese tourists each spent US$192.84 per day in Thailand. The next most extravagant visitors hailed from the Middle East, who dropped US$190.60 on average in a day. Taking up the rear as the tightest tourists were those from Europe, who each parted with just US$125.47 per day. However, Western tourists do tend to stay for significantly longer – Europeans for 17 days versus eight for the Chinese – and it all adds up.