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Has Thailand's Tourism Sector Merely "Struggled"?
Transcript of the above video:
As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the Tourism Sector here in Thailand. The reason I decided to make this video, I was reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, that is bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Dropping of Test and Go scheme expected to boost tourism sector in Pattaya.
A really good article, a lot of information in there, again bangkokpost.com but this just quick sentence I thought was really interesting: "The country's tourism sector has struggled for two years due to the pandemic." A couple of things there. First off, due to the pandemic or due to the Government's response to the pandemic? Let's clarify that one first because a virus in and of itself doesn't make Immigration Policy; doesn't set Tourism Policy; doesn't impose lockdowns; it doesn't do that, people do that. Let's set that aside but "struggled" that was the one that I thought was interesting. Struggled, it is more like decimated. We did a video I think back in January of 2022 this year, it was from the Bangkok Post, they were talking about the tourism numbers, and literally it was decimated. It was 1 tenth of, if Thailand's GDP had been I think it was 18% of overall GDP was made up by tourism, it had gone down to like 1.8 or 2%, decimated down to 1 tenth of what it once was so to say that the Tourism Sector is "struggling' is an understatement that is so vast it is almost insulting to the Tourism Industry. I am not calling out the Bangkok Post or anything. We use the words we use sometimes, we just say what we think at the time. Thailand's Tourism Sector has basically been put on life support, put into a coma and we need to get it out of there, truly.
Credit where credit is due, the Government is moving in that direction but we need to keep moving in that direction. Frankly we need to move, in my opinion with a little more alacrity. Hopefully over this summer, we will start seeing things move more in that direction and we will start seeing things move in such a way that that we see basically all these restrictions removed and we start seeing some real numbers coming in in late 2022 and early 2023.