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I was recently reading an article as the title of this video suggests, regarding the top spenders in terms of tourism. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from ZeroHedge, that is zerohedge.com, the article is titled: Americans Are By far the World's Biggest Tourism Spenders. Quoting directly, and I was kind of actually surprised by this a little bit having been out here the last roughly going on 17 years now, having sort of seen the ebbs and flows of Tourism. Look at the end of the day, American tourists are certainly in the tourism market here, there's no doubt about that and the unique relationship between the United States and Thailand I think causes Thailand to punch a little above its weight in terms of the numbers of American tourists that come here because it is a long trip quite honestly. It's literally halfway around the world from where I am from in Kansas, going over the Pacific, it's a long trip. Long story short, it's a long trip. It's a longer trip than it is for Europeans, or the British or for example the Australians, it's quite a trek, so it doesn't really surprise me that Americans are, in terms of volume, a little bit lower than some other tourists than some other groups if you will grouping by nationality. Comparatively Americans are sort of lower if you will in that stratification but at least up to now there has been some kind of disproportionate bang for your buck if you will, again as getting it in this article, it does appear that they do spend a bit more. Quoting directly: "China is yet to fully recover from its pandemic-induced travel slump with projections forecasting outbound tourism to be back on track by the end of 2025. According to the latest available data from the UN World Tourism Organization, the Asian Nation lost his position as the world's leading tourism spender in 2022 after having held its position since 2013." Quoting further: "Although China still saw an increase of some 5 billion dollars in outbound tourism spending between 2021 and 2022, it was not enough to match the surge in spending from the United States in that time period which more than doubled" and this I thought was pretty staggering, "it has more than double from 75 billion to 162 billion dollars." Quoting further: "This spate of increased travel includes the phenomenon of "revenge tourism", a term coined on social media following the lifting of COVID restrictions as people started to go on trips that they previously were unable to take." On a side note, I kind of prefer there be some revenge of other kinds on the people that imposed the COVID restrictions in the first place but I am a believer in the rule of law so maybe we do it under due process. 

Leaving that aside, and all joking aside, this is a pretty interesting phenomenon to me. I did not notice that the Americans actually continue to be a dominant tourism spender in this market. Again they are a bit on the lower side in terms of numbers but as we pointed out in a prior video, they are the number 3 next to the Chinese and Russians in terms of condo purchases here in Thailand. So again, while Americans may not quite have the same numbers, just raw numbers in terms of volume tourism, it does appear at least from the information in that article, and I urge those who are watching this video go check that out in detail, but it does appear from that article, from the information contained therein, that "oh it turns out that yeah Americans do outspend". So while they may have less numbers in terms of volume, they may be having a disproportionately more positive economic benefit on the countries that they are tourists in.