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As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing a tourism "Bonanza" here in Thailand. Let's get into this. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Phuket expects B400bn bonanza in 2024. There has been a lot going around in the news here that "oh Thailand, we need economic stimulus; there's a downturn", and then the data is coming in and it's saying 'Hey man, quarter one was great'. We saw a tremendous high season; consumer spending was way up in Thailand.  I think it was up almost seven percent, eight percent year on year. I mean that was a big thing. Everybody is kind of looking around saying - I think it's interesting. There seems to be one group that wants to say "no, no the economy's bad, we need stimulus." Well that seems to be associated with the "we want this "digital wallet" thing so therefore we need a pretext for that and the stimulus is the pretext so we're going to go ahead and push forward with that but we need the narrative to be that we are going through economic bad times”. Hey I have got news for you. The Thais have already been through economic bad times, they know the difference okay. 2024 ain't that, alright? Now go back into 2021, the latter part of 2020 and yeah we are looking at a totally different scenario there, okay? You wanted to talk about economic stimulus, why wasn't anybody talk about it then? Why wasn't anybody talk about all this stuff when they were shutting down all the businesses and telling us we couldn't do business? That said, let's get into this. 

Quoting: "The Tourism Authority of Thailand is confident that tourism revenue in Phuket this year will reach at least 400 billion Baht, reporting that more than 3.6 million tourists visited the resort island in the first quarter. The number of tourists coming to Phuket from January to March increased by 30% compared to the same period last year." So already, from 23 to 24 - 23 we were open for the most part, so from 23 to 24 it has gone up 30%. Quoting further:  "Revenue earned from tourism in the first quarter was 137 billion Baht, which also improved from a year ago." Quoting further: "Phuket may now be entering its off-peak season," but this is key; this is something key; I want to get into this, "its off-peak season," so-called low season, "but the number of hotel reservations on the island has not dropped significantly, he added. Local business operators thus regard the island as having no low season and dub this period of the year the ‘green season’." Now I wonder why they are calling it the "Green Season". Could it possibly be because there's this new product in Thailand which has not been legal in the past which now foreigners, tourists are coming to Thailand because they can avail themselves of the ability to enjoy this product in a legal setting? And is it evening out the strong ebbs and flows, the swings we have to deal with the Thailand between high season and low season. Is it evening that out? It looks to be doing so. And if that is the case, isn't that a major benefit to the Kingdom? I would say it is. Quoting further: "Currently the average number of foreign tourists arriving via direct flights is 10,000 per day compared to about 6,000 during the low season in the past. Phuket has the most hotel rooms of any province in Thailand, at 101,000. The occupancy rate has declined but not substantially, from 86% in March to 70% in May." I can't tell you how much of a positive benefit this is to the economy if indeed this is a tourism byproduct of again, this new product we have here in Thailand; this ‘green’ product that no other jurisdiction in Asia allows people to partake in, especially here in Southeast Asia that many, many foreigners, especially Western foreigners, are very interested in coming here to enjoy themselves in a tourism setting and yes this is part of it, okay. Long story short, anything we can do here in Thailand to improve the tourism sector, to improve the economy, to make sure people are getting paid, to make sure people's bellies are full is a good thing. Now we have to do cost benefit analyses and we have to say "well is the benefit outweighed by the cost?" I have failed to see where anyone has shown me a significant cost to Thailand from the "green" if you will. Again, it doesn't kill anybody. Now they have come out and say "well there are psychiatric events." Well how many psychiatric events have occurred from beer since the dawn of time? I mean I can cite six things that happened last week in any of the resort facilities here in Thailand arising from somebody getting too drunk and acting obnoxiously and crazily. Just as easily can happen from alcohol as anything else. 

Long story short, everyone should be keeping this in mind because this has an impact on tourism numbers and I have got to be honest with you, whatever politician out there decides to reverse this trend, is playing with serious fire with the Thai economy. Again, go back and look at these numbers. There used to be "direct flights per day were 6,000 now it's 10,000" and that's in low season. They're not even seeing a significant drop in occupancy rates; tourism it's a-booming, quite honestly to quote Brad Pitt in the movie - I can't remember that movie off the top of my head where he plays Aldo Raine, or whatever - I can't remember the name of the movie off the top of my head. But long story short, yeah it's booming. The tourism sector is doing great. Now is that the only piece of the economy? No. Are there other pieces; the export economy and things that may be having some issues right now? Well perhaps, but maybe tourism is picking up the slack of exports, where exports picked up the slack in the past when we didn't have tourism. At the end of the day, I don't see where there is a major downside to having the, shall we say volatility of the tourism cycle in Thailand being smoothed out and seeing more ongoing occupancy rates here in Thailand over the long term and if the "green season" is how we get there, well then so be it.