Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are posing the question: "what is OverTourism?" Let me just get into this and then I want to get in the analysis here. 

I thought of making this video after reading a recent article in the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com; there was also another article in Bangkok Post talking about this OverTourism thing but I initially found it in Pattaya Mail so I like to cite where I originally find things. The article is titled: Officials fear Pattaya and Phuket are overcrowded hotspots. Quoting directly: "The Federation of Thai Tourism Associations has formally warned the Thai Government that OverTourism is now at crisis point." You know I'm always fascinated by the verbiage: "crisis point", okay. Quoting further: "With projections that the calendar year 2024 will see 40 million overseas visitors - parallel to the 2019, the last pre-COVID year." Well isn't that good news. All we have been hearing the past what, four years is that "we are never going to get tourism back" and "COVID decimated everything", "oh, woe is us" and "we need to stimulate the economy by creating digital currency to track and trace everyone" but now we have got to worry about overtourism! Quoting further: "Both the environment and tourist comfort are under dire threat. Chris Flynn, Chief Officer of the World Tourism Association said the Thai Authorities don't seem to have determined "what they can take before they break". Break what? We are not talking about a dam. I mean! Quoting further: "The most obvious signs of overtourism in Pattaya are awesome traffic congestion made worse by tour buses crowding the inadequate roads and road repairs being conducted at several points in or near the city center." Well they are also doing a bunch of road work too. And again, we are going back to parallel what we were at in 2019. Nobody was talking about OverTourism in 2019. We were looking for the next year and hoping we could keep those numbers going, to keep the money coming in. Where did this this overtourism stuff come from? Quoting further: "John Leeman, a tourist from Liverpool UK said "It takes me at least 1 hour after dark to travel from Jomtien to Central Pattaya, twice last year's time," Well last year no one was there, I mean you know! Quoting further: "And when you get to your destination, parking is near impossible." Yeah the tourists are back; the internal tourists are back." What are we talking about here? For years it was, "well tourism might die and da, da, da, and now we have got it back. I mean not to get too hyperbolic here but this is a problem we want to have, in fact it's a "problem" we have been striving for ("problem" in quotation marks) it's a “problem” we have been striving for like 4 years now, ever since they shut down our entire economy and we literally watched people do away with themselves. I was here. I'm fascinated that everyone has this like short-term amnesia. Does no one remember the rice lines, the tuk-tuk drivers sitting around Lumpinee Park who couldn't make money anymore because everything was shut down and Thais were donating food to those people; we had to have food lines down in Pattaya because there was no business and now the media is out talking about overtourism. Yes I understand there may be infrastructural challenges to 40 million people coming into the country. Thailand can handle it. It has been handling it since the dawn of time; it's been handling it infrastructurally for the last 50 years. "Overtourism" - the implication being we need less tourists? Is that a great idea? 

Meanwhile, yeah I do get that there are issues associated with folks coming in to Thailand, working illegally, living here even though they are ostensibly coming as tourists. Those are different issues but this whole notion of OverTourism, what is that? And by the way, I am really kind of creeped out by this constant movement, narrative wise, to create these new words. What was it Lenin said – V.I. Lenin - said "we shall win through slogans" and his point was you create these buzz words and then you sort of get people behind these buzz words and it's not necessarily for the public good. Again I mean you look at the history of Bolshevism and what Lenin did. I mean yeah he used a lot of slogans and those slogans killed a lot of people. I’m not saying it's that dire here in this country but what I'm saying is this slogan of overtourism, what does that serve? Again, we spent years having no tourism, praying to get it back and we have. And by the way, Thailand should be proud of herself and everybody that's involved in that. That includes folks in the new Government, the folks in the old Government that tried to get things going and just the grassroots Thais themselves ought to be proud of what they have accomplished in getting their tourism numbers back up. This notion of overtourism, and the implied notion that we need less tourists! No. At the end of the day, tourism needs to be encouraged like it always has been. I do get that when we go into the low season, there is a different impetus on the part of Thai Immigration to go after people who may be using their tourist status to live here and things illegally but that's a totally different animal from the notion of “overtourism” and we need to do something about this “problem”. Again, this is a problem we want to have; it's a problem we strived for for years so I don't see where this over tourism notion is coming from.