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What Is the Tourism Council of Thailand (TCT)?

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the Tourism Council of Thailand. I have had a number of people send me some emails here recently where they have said, "I am reading conflicting things from TAT (the Tourism Authority of Thailand) and then TCT, (the Tourism Council of Thailand) so I decided I wanted to make a series of videos to get into this. 

This is actually from the Tourism Council of Thailand which can be found in thailandtourismcouncil.org and this is their "About" page. Quoting directly: “Tourism Council of Thailand - The Tourism Council of Thailand was established in December of 2001 to be the representative of all tourism industry operators which would create benefits in terms of systematic cooperation between the related organizations, both public and private sectors. It is to propose important guideline policy, promote quality verification system, standard system and quality assurance system of the businesses related to the goods or services for tourists and to encourage the tourism industry operators to carry out the operation with quality, morality and ethics so as to promote the efficiency and development of this industry." 

So clearly the Tourism Council of Thailand is designed if you will, I would view it as almost a trade association, akin to. Maybe that is not quite parallel and it is different from the Tourism Authority of Thailand. As we have noted in another video, the Tourism Authority of Thailand is an organization under the Tourism Ministry that has a mandate to promote tourism. It is a different thing. Its legacy organization goes all the way back to 1924, clearly almost a century, well least 80 years older than the TCT which was founded in 2001. The way that I look at this and a lot of people have said "look, the Tourism Council is saying for lack of a better term, pessimistic things about tourism whereas TAT is not saying these things; they are being more optimistic." That is the wrong way to look at it. Understand, the Tourism Council of Thailand is a Trade organization so they are talking about things that might be even more at a grassroots level of tourism providers in Thailand compared to TAT which is taking a top down approach coming from the government side of things. The other thing to understand is TAT is there as a promotional organization, to promote tourism to Thailand. TCT as I said is more akin to a trade organization so when for example the tourism sector of Thailand is suffering as it has for example in the last 9 months in response to COVID, since this whole COVID situation has come down the pike, the TCT are going to be airing some of the grievances or concerns of the tourism industry. It is a different kind of organization so when you see things, there almost seems to be a cognitive dissonance among the publications regarding tourism in Thailand and you will see TCT says this TAT says that, they may not necessarily be in conflict, they are just coming at things from a different angle.