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The question posed by this video is: "Are Tourists actually returning to Thailand?" We have now been essentially reopened especially for the vaccinated to a non-quarantine reopening; I mean you have to spend a night in a hotel but essentially you can get into Thailand in a pretty straightforward manner now. The question posed is: "Are tourists coming in?"

A recent article kind of gets into this, from ASEAN NOW, that is aseannow.com, the article is titled: It's expats, not tourists that are visiting Thailand: Business leader. Quoting directly: "A key figure in Thailand's tourism industry pulled absolutely no punches when commenting on the country's supposed "reopening". Thanet Suphatarathatrangsi, Chairman of the Chonburi Tourism Business Association, (sorry, transliterations of Thai last names, Thai “nam sakul”, when I am reading through it I lose the plot so if stall when I am doing those names that is what it is coming from) quoting further: "echoed what people online have been saying for weeks if not months. In an interview with Business Media he said there are virtually no tourists coming into Thailand despite the rhetoric of the Government after their much vaunted reopening claims. The only arrivals are not true tourists at all just business people, property owners or those with families." Well I don't know if that is necessarily the case. I have met a few people, younger people mostly who can only be described as tourists. I mean they are here; they have told me "well I don't know how long I am going to be here but a few weeks, a few months and then I am going back." Yeah I have met a few people just anecdotally in the past week or so that seem to be genuinely tourists and genuinely coming here for tourism purposes. But look, this was always, especially in the first months of this, I think this was always going to be case. The people who were going to, especially retirees who didn't really want to go through two week quarantine, I think they were kind of biding their time. I have talked to people that are even married to Thais that were just waiting; for work reasons oftentimes they weren't able to, if they worked off shore or in another country, they just couldn't do a two week quarantine, they could not make it happen. So the long and the short of it is, yeah I think that this was always going to be the case, there was always going to be more expats. 

Now the thing to remember, we have got to keep staying open because tourists plan ahead. They book months if not a year in advance sometimes, maybe years in advance. If they think that it is shaky that Thailand may even be open or that they can lose money as a result of booking any flights or something, they are not going to do it or they are going to wait. They are going to say "well we will put Thailand on the back burner as a tourist destination." 

So the thing I would say is even though right at this moment we are not seeing a huge influx of tourists, we need to be patient because moving forward, yeah I think if folks understand that Thailand has gotten their situation under control, Thailand has reopened, then yeah I think we will probably get tourists, if not this High Season, next High Season.