Transcript of the above video: 

There was a time during COVID where I kept talking about Travel Bubbles. It seemed like for darn near a year I was talking about Travel Bubbles; never happened. Another one that seems to be an ongoing recurring theme and then like it gets talked about and doesn't happen has been this Tourist Tax which I have always thought this was a bad idea. As we will get into, there are other folks here in Thailand that agree with that. I really wish the government would stop trying to come up with this and move on to something else, because optically, it looks terrible. I frankly don't want them to have a bunch of money off the tourists to come up with more stuff to tell us what to do with, track and trace us all, just generally bother us with a bunch of bureaucratic nonsense. But that said, they don't exactly ask me for policy guidance. 

I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Calls grow to halt entry fee. Quoting directly: "Tourism operators have called on the Government to postpone plans to introduce a 300-baht tourist entry fee, warning it could discourage cross-border travel and duplicate existing insurance coverage for visitors. The proposal was raised at a Tourism Development Meeting chaired by Tourism and Sports Minister Surasak Phancharoenworakul in Hat Yai. The meeting brought together government agencies, the private sector, the Songkhla Chamber of Commerce, Tourism Associations and hotel operators to discuss border-crossing facilitation and safety measures. Songchai Mungprasitchai, President of the Songkhla Tourism Promotion Association, said tourism businesses had urged the government to delay the fee and conduct a more comprehensive study. He said the charge could overlap with travel insurance already provided by tour operators. Mr. Songchai said the greatest concern was for the southern border provinces, where large numbers of people crossed daily between Thailand and Malaysia for trade, work, dining and short visits." 

Yeah, this is just another example of where the Government is coming in to intervene with some new tax and all it is doing is causing the actual value creating part of the economy to suffer, like they mention in the southern border thing. There are probably tons of people that come and go across that border every day. They bring in value from their side of the Border; folks from Thailand do the same thing. I'm sure if there is a big tax that is imposed upon the Malaysians, the Malaysians are at least going to look at possibly putting on a similar tax for Thais coming across the border, so that will have an indirect negative impact on Thais. Then on top of that, again this tax would discourage people from wanting to come over the border - "I don't want to pay 300 Baht to just walk 18 feet. I'll stay over here and eat some noodles here rather than eating some noodles over there." And who does not benefit from that? Sort of the opposite of Cui Bono. Well, it's the person that didn't get that business. Same deal coming in from the airports. Optically, again it doesn't look good to prospective tourists that they are going to get hit up for money just for wanting to come to Thailand and spend money. 

At the end of the day, I think we are getting to the point where truly we need to look at dropping this Tourism Tax once and for all.