Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing more tourism initiatives in kind of a PAN-ASEAN context. What are we talking about here? Well I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post print edition, I'm going to throw that up there on screen; I'm sure you can go ahead and find this article over at the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article was titled: Brunei inks pacts to boost trade, tourism. Then if you get into the article, and I urge those who are watching this video, check out that article the detail, lot more information than what we are talking about here, it's really rather insightful but that said, quoting directly: "They also agreed to strengthen tourism cooperation including through the "Six Countries, One Destination" scheme, a pilot proposed by Thailand to promote regional tourism cooperation and also agreed to cooperate in health and wellness tourism, ecotourism and Muslim friendly tourism. In addition both sides would work towards expanding flight routes from Brunei to Thailand." 

You know, I have got to say, I made a video contemporaneously with this one where we discussed sort of "credit where credit is due" regarding tourism and Thailand and I think that "credit where credit's due", this Government here in Thailand especially these past roughly what are we at now 6 months it has been in office, it has been administering the Government here, they have done a pretty darn good job with regard to tourism. I just have to say that credit truly where credit is due. They have performed well in terms of that function and it looks to me like this Government is highly attuned to the idea that tourism is a very important component of the Thai economy and not just to sort of the standard aspects of the Thai economy, the so-called captains of industry or elites, whatever you want to say - I don't want to get into all that kind of terminology - but tourism at the end of the day has significant positive implications for the for lack of a better term, lower or more common strata in the Thai economy; little people essentially benefit from tourism. So anything this Government can do to help improve tourism here in Thailand, be it through marketing initiatives like this where further cooperation on a regional level, bilateral initiatives as with Brunei again the Sultan of Brunei has come to Thailand to discuss this amongst many other things I'm sure, and this is nothing but win-win I think for everybody, and I think it is a good idea.

I like the way that they are approaching this sort of cooperative, regional look at tourism because again I don't think this is something, I talked in another video about what I am calling sort of the Tourism Cold War here in Southeast Asia. It seems like some countries are trying to make other countries look bad or whatever. I really like again credit where credit is due on this Thai Government, where they are saying "hey we're not looking to do that; we're not looking to make other countries look bad", what we're looking to do is cooperate maybe create a platform out here where tourists want to come out and do a regional tour. If you watch, there's an old movie, Tea with Mussolini I think Cher was in it, or if you read about that era - that sort of interwar period even prior to the first World War - when people would go, especially the British would go on Grand Tours of certain places in the world and Tea with Mussolini it pertained to Italy obviously, but the point I am trying to make is this notion of a Grand Tour, this notion of a more regional approach and a more cooperative approach to tourism, I think will benefit a lot more folks on a broader scale and over a longer period of time than this whole notion "well we have got to make this country look bad so we can pick up a couple of extra tourists"! To my mind that is silliness. I think that's a waste of time and resources where at the end of the day, a lot of people that look over here at Southeast Asia and I don't mean this in a pejorative sense, but they don't look at it as like "I only want to go to this one country". A lot of people look at it and say "hey, I would love to go into Thailand and then maybe hop over to Siem Reap and check out Angkor Wat in Cambodia for a minute or head over to Bali, Indonesia for a few days or a week if I'm over there for six; or backpackers for that matter who generally come out here and they tend to kind of go around the whole region. Again there are a lot of ways in which cooperation with regard to this issue is going to be a lot more profitable I suspect in the long run than competition.