Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are asking the question: "Has Thailand chosen to de-prioritize Tourism?" We talked about this going back, I think it was in 2020 the Tourism and Sports Minister, Phiphat Rathchakitprakarn brought up the fact that maybe Tourism wasn't going to be quite the high priority it had been and I think in that context they meant in light of the pandemic. The question posed by this video is moving forward, is Thailand de-prioritizing Tourism? 

I am actually asking this question because I myself have been thinking about this; I have been thinking about it for years now. I said long before the pandemic, going back to like 2018, Thailand has always had this kind of Sophie's Choice if you will in terms of the fact that it has a manufacturing sector and an export sector that is rather dependent on Thailand's currency being relatively weak compared to her export partners, most notably for example the United States and Europe for that matter. Then at the same time, it has a Tourism Sector which is very much the same way; the weaker the Baht is the more Tourism money tends to flow into the country and again it creates this kind of Sophie's Choice. What would Thailand choose if it had to give up one of these segments of GDP? I suspect probably Tourism. Manufacturing and exports are probably viewed as a higher priority but only just. In the aftermath of this pandemic where we seeing the tourism sector essentially decimated in terms of overall percentage of GDP, I suspect hopefully we will see kind of a paradigm shift with respect to thinking about encouragement of Tourism here in Thailand, hopefully to the point where we will see substantial policy changes to where, maybe not policy changes but enforcement of policy or enactment of policy in such a way that it is more favourable to bringing people in rather than sort of keeping people out for lack of a better term.

So hopefully we will see that moving forward. We will certainly keep you updated on this channel as the situation evolves.