Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing, well Chinese tourists. Let me just dig in here. The reason I thought of making this video is I was reading recent article in the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Chinese tourists to Thailand no longer dependent on air travel. Quoting directly and this was a really interesting article. It had a lot of interesting insights in it insofar as explaining that even though Chinese folks can't necessarily get to Thailand by air, due to the new High-Speed rail up in Laos there is a lot more interaction with the Chinese market from that area than there once was. Interesting stuff but I am going to quote an excerpt here. Quoting directly: "Although Thailand is numerically dependent on Chinese tourism - about one third of 40 million visitors in 2019 hailed from China - critics say that few Thai business people benefit greatly from the phenomenon. The Chinese tourists are mostly zero-sum, that is paid for in advance of travel with favored hotels, restaurants, entertainment and hotels booked beforehand. This applies equally to economy tourists and the wealthy High flyers." I hear the critique, I think it's a little bit off. First off, this notion of "zero sum" this was called going back I don't know how many years now, it feels like six or seven maybe only five but I think it's going back a little while, Thai tax officials especially and then eventually police and law enforcement officials began cracking down on what became called zero-dollar tourism in Thailand and that was basically a scenario in which Chinese folks were paying offshore entities, my understanding primarily out of Hong Kong, were paying offshore tourist groups in that jurisdiction to come down here to Thailand and then that sort of organization kind of had its own like syndicate of places where they would take these tour groups and really no appreciable money would change hands in Thailand and therefore no taxes got into the Thai system notwithstanding the fact that a large number of people were coming into Thailand and quite honestly putting burdens on the infrastructure and things as people do in a tourism context.

So that was all kind of done away with some years back. It was my understanding before quarter one of 2020 or quarter one of 2020 and before, Chinese tourists were actually considered a rather large benefit even to like hoteliers and things. I knew people that would tell me "hey look, Chinese tourists actually pay higher prices than westerners because they don't use like the discount travel booking online systems and things. As a result, again I heard this anecdotally, take it for what you will, it's not the end all be all in terms of the definitive information on this but that not all Chinese tourists were so-called zero-sum, zero-dollar tourists, there were folks who were coming in and spending a substantial amount of money. 

Now interestingly enough, and I think that this is a bias that is inherent in the English language Press here in Thailand, quite honestly they don't visit venues that farang, that the foreigner really go to. They are not going to the same places that Caucasian tourists from the west or just Westerners generally are going to go to here in Thailand. They don't even really have the same travel patterns it is my understanding as folks from other parts of East Asia: Korean, Japanese, Philippine, folks that come from those parts of the world, there is not a lot of overlap. The Chinese kind of do their own thing in terms of the tourism areas they go to. Now obviously yeah there is tourist attractions, the Grand Palace etc., that are kind of everybody goes to, that is kind of a mainstay, but again I mean I think it's a little bit unfair, yeah there was a time when yeah Chinese tourism was not overly beneficial to Thailand, I think that time has gone. Now that said, until things are fully reopened, I think it remains to be seen whether or not they really are the boon that some say they are and it is hard to say whether they have as many negative connotations as others say they have.