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As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the possibility of a "Tourist Tax" here in Thailand. I was a bit flabbergasted but I recently read an article in the Bangkok Post, that is bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Collection of B500 Fee from Foreigners Starts Next Year. Quoting directly: "The Tourism and Sports Ministry is poised to start collecting a 500 Baht tourism fee for a "tourism transformation fund" next year with the budget following a co-payment model. Quoting further: "Yuthasak Supasorn, Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) Governor, said the fee collection of 500 Baht per person should start next year with the aim of collecting 5 billion within the first year assuming 10 million foreign arrivals in 2022." Well one that is big assumption. I mean 10 million foreign arrivals, that is a lot of folks showing up. Frankly I don't know how that is going to happen if things don't pretty fundamentally change with respect to the rules for coming into Thailand as they currently stand. 

Now this "tourism transformation fund", they get into a whole bunch of what I can only describe as sloganeering and using some buzzwords, "social enterprises", "bio-, circular and green economic model", "environmentally concerned tourism", there is nothing wrong with any of that but what I thought is interesting is and quoting directly again from this article: "Helping the country restructure from mass tourism to high-value or a bio-, circular and green economic model." How does that work? I am really curious to know. High volume tourism has worked for Thailand, there is no doubt about that. 40 million people came in 2019, made up between 17 and 20% of the overall GDP. It is a staggering amount of GDP. It is almost 1/5th of GDP. If you consider and I am speculating here, but I think I am making a pretty good educated guess, if you consider all the knock-on economic activity that comes from let's call it conservatively 17% of overall GDP, I think you make up the extra 3% and therefore a fifth of the overall economy was coming in from the "mass tourism model" that we saw. Now I do understand where authorities, the Government, whoever, the private enterprise, whatever, the numbers are not going to be immediately back to what they were in 2019 quite frankly probably anytime soon. Therefore you have to be realistic and you have to as I heard said back home when I was a kid, you have got to plow the fertile field. You do the best with what you got. So I understand numbers are going to be lower. No one's blaming anyone. I am certainly not blaming anyone for numbers overall being lower. What scares me is that this is a paradigm shift, again just to quote that again: "Helping the country re-structure from "mass tourism". Why are we getting away from mass tourism? Mass tourism has helped Thailand tremendously. There is a good argument to be made that mass tourism may have helped stabilize the Baht currency in the aftermath of the 1997 financial crisis. I am curious. Look and there is argument and reasonable people can disagree on whether or not tourism is great for an economy, I certainly think a strong manufacturing base is always a good thing. I don't think Thailand should be wholly dependent on tourism. My point being though is this seems to just be a theme where the bureaucracy is just deciding "yeah we don't need any of that mass tourism anymore so we are just going to move over to this model now". That is scary to me because I don't think people are really especially, if it is the case that this is being driven by folks that basically their entire career has been spent working in the Government, now albeit working in the Government perhaps in the tourism sector, but government work is government work at the end of the day. As I have noted in other videos on this channel, there is nothing wrong with folks who work for the Government. I deal with them all the time, they are fine but they have a certain perspective, they have a certain paradigm and they can't see past it. Quite frankly private enterprise folks can't see past private enterprise; they only see things in the world of private enterprise. They are not always right about everything. That is not my point but to have quite frankly the bureaucracy driving the ship on this and to be driving it away from "mass tourism", I have to say why are we doing that? And is this the best idea? Meanwhile, this was in the Bangkok Post, it is already well out there, it is well known I would say. It is out in the open-sphere, it is in the commons if you will. 

Again, I really hope people in an authority position over this, maybe take a moment and rethink the optics on how this looks. We have gone almost 18 months with very low, subsistence to the point of non-existent, tourism levels for the overall tourism industry. It has not been good for the Tourism Industry by a long shot. We have discussed 2-3 million layoffs in the Tourism Industry alone according to the Tourism Council of Thailand. I have done videos on that. On top of that, the numbers are staggeringly off. Therefore one of these solutions to this is to tax what few tourists we are going to have coming in starting January 2022? Is that really the best idea right now? Maybe we should let them get in the door and just spend some money and get some tax off the VAT and the various corporate income taxes and things like that that come in from them just being here. That would be perhaps another way of dealing with this. 

That being said, I found this really concerning; again it is from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, Collection of Baht 500 Fee from Foreigners Starts Next Year. I really hope this is rethought because I definitely think that there could be some serious negative ramifications from implementing a policy like this.