Transcript of the above video:

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and this person asked, he said: "So Ben, you have been kind of critical of certain aspects of the Government out here” and I think that is something of an understatement in many ways and he said "is there anything you like about the things the Government is doing?" Well you know me. I am kind of a weird libertarian so I am never overly pro-government, that is just my default position. I am aware you need some but I often think what I think 'some Government' is, is practically no Government to other people.

Setting that all aside, in any event I was talking to my friend and he said “you talk a lot about what you are critical of but is there anything that you have found has been a positive aspect to this Government?” And my response was "yeah actually", and he was surprised about just how adamantly positive I was about the title of this video which is the Government's response to tourism. And I think this Government, since we have seen this coalition form and this Government take shape back in whatever it was - September - they have gone out of their way to make tourism a priority and I think they have done a pretty good job. We are now on the other side of Songkran; we are sort of going more into the doldrums out here, or the true low season, and I think we can now kind of look back a little more objectively at the high season and this Government had a lot to do with the success that we saw in the high season. And I think it's important to point that out. Sort of good behaviour should be noted because you kind of want to see more of that, you want to encourage that kind of thing and I would like to encourage the Government to continue to support initiatives that would be positive for tourism here in Thailand. 

Now that said, when I read these articles we talked about one previously last week regarding so-called "overtourism", I start wondering if perhaps our current Prime Minister might be spouting a little too much of these talking points from the World Economic Forum because as somebody pointed out to me, it just sort of seems like any time anybody starts getting into a positive feedback loop economically, they start making some money or they start getting some traction, this WEF thinking seems to come in where it is like, "no I have to stop that dead in its tracks!" Again as we discussed in that video, when did anybody ever use the term "overtourism" in the past? I have never even heard of that because it is not a word by the way. It is a made-up word and as I said in that video, anytime you start seeing made up words, start looking hard at who is making them up and then start trying to figure out why. 

That being said, again I can commend the present coalition, the present government, for their efforts at helping with tourism here. I think they have done a laudable job at getting the numbers back to where we wanted them. I think we beat expectations. I was reading somewhere that we were back to 2019 levels, looking back on this past high season and then again these WEF talking points start coming out "oh overtourism", we need to be worrying about that!" Do we? Really? 

I do understand, I think even other folks who might even be in the opposition now have talked about the necessity to perhaps start promoting more sort of, I hesitate to say "off brand" but in the sense of like “off Broadway”, some less premier destinations in the sense that promoting provinces that people, especially tourists, may not otherwise know about because we are starting to see some real issues in places like Phuket, Pattaya, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, even Hua Hin, Samui, the kind of usual suspects of tourism here in Thailand we are seeing a lot of, there may be some genuine concerns regarding overcrowding and maybe just too many people showing up. This is a problem we want to have by the way here in Thailand so again it all stems from the Government and just general market demand being in Thailand's favour with regard to tourism. That said, what I would say to that is well then what we need to do is stop promoting other parts of Thailand so that people say, "hey I have been there once and I really liked going to Jomtien Beach, but hey maybe next time I will go to Krabi, I will go down to Koh Samet or I will head over to Trat or maybe up-country. I will go over to Kanchanaburi and check out the Old Bridge on the River Kwai kind of thing or something of this nature". Again these are problems we want to have but let's not get into a negative feedback loop where we start talking about things like "overtourism" and these kind of notions which to my mind are both silly and counterproductive.