Transcript of the above video:

I am not going to go ahead and quote any one story per se but I have noticed in the ether of the internet there been a number of stories throughout the news outlets here in Thailand talking about the Government and their desire to go ahead and possibly provide Visa exemption status specifically to lure in more Chinese tourists. While I don't have any problem with that per se and in fact I would like to see more tourism across the board, I think it's interesting that the focus seems to be exclusively on China; that bringing back Chinese tourists sort of seems to be almost the exclusive priority.

I think, especially in light of the past couple of years and the demography shift we have seen in terms of Tourism numbers here in the Kingdom, while concentrating on yes getting back Chinese tourists, again Chinese tourists made up for a large number of tourists going back quarter one of 2020 and beyond further back into 2019-2018, we saw massive influxes of Chinese tourists and it was a major benefit to the hotel system here in Thailand, the tourism sector here in Thailand, I get it. I understand the impetus behind looking to get those Chinese tourists coming back here to Thailand. But I think that by exclusively looking at them only, the tourism sector maybe has a blind spot to other possibilities.

One thing I have really noticed is the influx of Indian tourists and again much like with the Chinese tourists where perhaps Western expats and Western tourists don't see exactly where they spend the same amount of money as Western tourists, they do spend money in Thailand, they just spend it in their own ways. They spend it on the things they want to spend, that they prioritize. The Chinese were much the same way. Long were the Chinese tourists sort of lamented especially by expats here because "oh they don't spend very much money", when in point of fact and we have done the videos on this, hoteliers and things actually said, "no, Chinese tourists spend more on hotels and things than Western tourists", for example because Chinese tourists tended to use package systems and pay closer to retail price associated with hotels. 

Again, now I haven't done the deep dive yet for example on Indians specifically but I'm not even just saying it is Chinese or Indian, I am saying just across the board, let's look at everywhere. Let's look at setups across the board for tourism; let's look at people from anywhere in the world, South America, even possibly different places to where Thailand's ever, again the Gulf States come to mind in terms of the possibility of increased tourists especially in light of the fact that diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Thailand were recently realigned; that's a pretty good example of a place that probably has a lot of untapped tourists for Thailand.

So again, my point being with this, this isn't like no, we don't want Chinese. Those numbers are huge and we certainly would love to see them back but I think to sort of look to the Chinese to the exclusion of other nationalities is a bit of a short-sighted way of thinking about tourism policy here in the Kingdom of Thailand.