Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing whether or not Thailand should court "lower spending tourists”. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Thai Examiner, that's thaiexaminer.com, the article is titled: Thailand turns to Russia as foreign tourist revenue is projected to be only 21% of 2019 record figure. Well a couple of things off that title. Yeah, I suspect it will be quite low compared to 2019 but in 2019 we didn't have three quarters of the year where we were in some level of lockdown, half the year when basically people couldn't get in or it was very, very cumbersome to get in. Then only in the final quarter did things sort of open up so let's sort of try to keep things in perspective. This is really good article by the way, a lot of information in there. As usual, Thai Examiner does a real deep dive. I am going to quote an excerpt but there's a lot more going on in there. I urge those who are watching this video go check out that article for more information, but quoting directly from this one line: "Thailand is likely to end the year with just over the fifth of foreign tourism revenue seen in 2019 despite reaching over 10 million visitors due to lower spending tourists." 

Well yeah this is kind of the whole debate I think that has been going on out there sort of in “policy maker land” and among the expats in the forums and things is this sort of debate between going after "high dollar, high spenders" and volume but they are lower spending. At the end of the day, I personally think you have a hard time arguing against volume especially where tourism makes up, depending on the statistics you read, between 18 and 20% of the overall GDP of Thailand is dependent on tourism. Well that's all sorts of Tourism. There's not going to be just 40,000 high net worth individuals that are going to be able to carry 20% of Thailand's GDP. We are going to need volume tourists here in Thailand and when you deal with volume tourism, there are going to be high spenders, big spenders, low spenders, medium spenders; there are going to be people on all spectrums and I would argue especially where we are dealing with issues associated with cost of Airlines, cost of flight, cost of energy, whoever gets here and is willing to spend money in Thailand be it tourist, I think should just be welcomed with open arms. It looks to me like policy makers tend to agree with that and case and point is changes to the exemption stamp rules which extend the lawful status that is conveyed by the Visa exemption, getting rid of the Emergency Decree, reopening everything, getting rid of all the testing requirements and everything to come into Thailand, all of this suggests much more of an open door policy and hopefully will auger well for bringing in a higher volume of tourists because quite frankly we need you all. If you are watching this from abroad, Thailand welcomes you. We are all ready to have you back; we definitely want to see tourists here in Thailand, tourists across the spectrum. As long as basically they can pay for themselves to come in, great. It really doesn't matter to me if they are economy tourists or high net worth individuals, whatever. Let's just get tourism back in Thailand and keep things moving along.