Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing whether or not Thailand seeking "upmarket tourists" is a "recipe for disaster". I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Thai Examiner, that is thaiexaminer.com, the article is titled: Nightlife until 4 am as poll shows plans to move foreign tourism upmarket a 'recipe for disaster'. Quoting directly: "The country's tourism chiefs will present a proposal to the Government in September to extend nightlife opening hours only in select and strictly controlled areas in foreign tourism hotspots in a plan designed to increase tourism earnings and attract more Western travellers from the country's key foreign tourist markets. It comes as tourism has emerged as the key to the ongoing economic recovery," (I'll get to that in a moment) "this year with a poll of Thai Examiner readers since July showing over 77% warning that plans to take the country's tourism industry upmarket would be a mistake and a 'recipe for disaster' if it went ahead." So a couple of things here. First of all, I kind of like how and I have noticed this across the media, different platforms and I am not pointing anybody out, and frankly the Thai Examiner I think has done better than some places where everybody just sort of has been "oh wow tourism is the key to economic recovery. Yeah that 20% of the overall GDP we've been missing the last two years. Yeah that's a pretty big key to some economic recovery going on around here. I don't know how to put. I don't know if it is intentional, I don't think it is intentional, I am not claiming that but this kind of strange sort of like inability to see what is right in front of your face. I mean we did the video going back I think it was January this year where we were talking about the Tourism Sector was literally decimated, so roughly depending on what you read 18- 20% of the overall GP here in Thailand comes from tourism and that went down like literally 90%. That was the statistics we were reading I think again going back into January, that was from the Bangkok Post and yeah that will have, if you take out 90% of 20% of your GDP so take out an overall what 18% of your overall GDP and just remove it, yeah that's going to have a tremendous negative impact and getting that back is certainly key to some economic recovery. I think that's pretty self-evident.

Now on to this issue of whether or not sort of aiming for upmarket tourism, this has been something I have been kind of ambivalent about or rather ambivalent about ever since I kind of started seeing this trend form about 14 -18 months ago in sort of the post sort of pandemic, whatever you want to call it, post lockdown era, they were going to kind of concentrate on upmarket tourism and it's like my thinking on that is let's just get tourists back. Anybody that can afford to come to Thailand, stay here, take care of themselves and then go on their merry way, why concentrate on anyone other than those people. That is kind of my thinking, that's exactly who we need. Somebody that can afford to come to Thailand; wants to be here and spend their money is pretty much who I am worried about in terms of getting back into Thailand. I don't know why we are sort of parsing out “well these tourists and these tourists and da, da, da.” To my mind, it just seems self-evident that we need as many tourists as we can get here in the Kingdom of Thailand.