Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the Tourism Authority of Thailand and what is it? They get quoted a lot and people have asked me "What is it?" so I decided to go ahead and do this video. Oddly enough after all my research, Wikipedia ended up being the most succinct in their description. So this is from the Wikipedia page, wikipedia.org, the entry: Tourism Authority of Thailand. Quoting directly: "The Tourism Authority of Thailand, TAT, is an organization of Thailand under the Ministry of Tourism and Sports. Its mandate is to promote Thailand's tourism industry." and I would urge folks to recall this we will get to this in a minute, "promote" so a key part of their mandate. Quoting further under history: "An organization called Tourism of Thailand was founded in 1924. For 50 years responsibility for attracting tourists to Thailand bounced around between the State Railway of Thailand, the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Transport and The Office of the Prime Minister. The Tourism Authority of Thailand was established on May 4, 1979."  And their website just FYI is tat.or.th. 

So in a sense they are a government organization, a government sponsored organization and their mandate is to promote tourism. It is for this reason that I think often times, especially we see when we are quoting stuff in the news from TAT, they tend to skew towards the optimistic because their job is promotion. They are here to promote tourism. So when you see things quoted from the TAT, it is a good idea to go ahead and understand what their function is, understand their paradigm because that way you can better understand what you are reading. I often times have people they often criticize because we will quote something TAT said on this channel that would have been overly optimistic about the circumstances, things aren't actually going that way or they didn't end up moving the way the TAT was talking about hopefully they were going to move to. Oftentimes we would see this with proposals for tourism initiatives in Thailand and especially under this COVID lockdown, under this response to COVID, we have seen a lot of stuff from TAT where they say they are proposing this or that and then something doesn't come to fruition. Well their job is to make proposals which promote tourism. So understand that when you are reading things in the press or elsewhere or even when we quote things from TAT that primarily their paradigm is to promote tourism so things should be viewed through that lens when reading their publications.