In 2023Thailand’s booming tourist industry is missing one key ingredient : the Chinese.
From January, Thailand’s tourist industry had been licking its lips at the imminent arrival of millions of Chinese. It expected an upsurge in business that would help its tourist industry recover much of the ground it lost during the Covid pandemic. Thoughts were of surpassing the 11 million people who came in 2019, but alas this has not been the case.
That rosy scenario has turned out to be far too optimistic. Fewer than 2.5 million came in the first nine months of 2023.
The new Thai government hoped its announcement of a five-month visa waiver would entice more tourists. But a shooting at Bangkok’s most famous shopping mall on 3 October, in which a Chinese mother of two children was killed, compounded an image problem confronting Thailand and other South East Asian countries.
They are now considered unsafe by many Chinese people.
In August a new film called No More Bets became a huge box office hit in China, earning tens of millions of dollars in its first few days. This has not helped Thailand’s cause as it depicts a Chinese model and a computer programmer being lured by the promise of high-paying jobs into a scam centre in an unnamed South East Asian country (many believe the similarity is to Thailand) and being forced to work in slave-like conditions.
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