Thailand now among top 10 travel destinations

The much maligned tourism figures were released for 2013 in a report by the UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), revealing Thailand now sits among the top 10 for the first time.

A total of 26 million people were recorded as visiting the Kingdom in 2013, an 18 per cent increase on the previous year, placing it 10th, behind France, United States, Spain, China, Italy, Turkey, Germany, the UK and Russia. It displaced Malaysia which had traditionally trumped Thailand.

However, these figures have always puzzled the tourism industry who concern themselves with real tourists rather than ‘visitors’, noting that the figures and rankings seem inconsistent with real experiences on the ground. For example, Thailand clearly has a much more robust and obviously busy tourist sector than Malaysia, who claim 20 million or more visitors per year. Likely these are transit or day trippers from Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand making multiple sort business trips. Likewise the million strong workforce of Cambodians and Burmese who might make several trips home per year significant skew Thailand’s figures.

Similar interpretations can be made of the European countries where people move freely across borders. Russia, with such an enormous border, obviously attracts plenty of neighbouring visitors but is yet to be counted as a truly popular global destination.  Most the European nations have seen little growth in recent years, but France remains the busiest, being geographically well placed among a wealthy continent on the move.

Measuring them by tourism receipts is a better measure, placing Thailand 7th, up two places, although it has a much lower per head spend. It raked in an estimated 42 billion US dollars in 2013 from direct formal-sector tourism spending, a whopping 24 per cent increase on the previous year, accounting for roughly 10 per cent of their local economy. However, tiny Macao and Hong Kong sit at 5th and 10th respectively on the list, demonstrating the power of the gambling and yuan from mainland China.     

Similarly Thailand's nascent rise in tourists in recent years is largely down to the travelling Chinese who rank Thailand among their favourite destinations. Some 4 million visited last year, a 100 per cent increase from the year before, but many were on so-called 'zero yuan' shopping trips, which have since be shut down by the Chinese government, resulting in a contraction of numbers.

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