Tourism
Tourism situation in Pukhet worse than after 2004 tsunami

As resort managers and marketing directores have told Phuketwan, Phuket’s plight is worse than after the 2004 tsunami. The tsunami was followed by a wave of international generosity that put tourists back on Phuket fast, and along the Andaman coast soon after. This will take longer. Phuket is going to suffer a lot of pain. Jobs will be lost, and so will investment.
The bargain hunters will come, because the rates will be attractive: they will have to be. Wolfgang Meusburger, a veteran of almost two decades at Patong's Holiday Inn, told Bloomberg: ''Something is broken and you hope that it can be mended, but this time, the damage is very great.''
And the pain will be more intense because, unlike the tsunami, the damage this time to Phuket's tourism industry was entirely avoidable.
Travel alerts, issued independently by 40 nations, simply failed to describe the situation accurately.

Phuket was always safe. There was never any real danger.
The enduring tragedy is that the international diplomatic community has done as much damage on Phuket as the arsonists have done in Bangkok. There will be at least six months of suffering: jobs gone, increased crime, poverty and deaths.
Tourism
Interprovincial travel in Thailand amid COVID-19 controls
The State Railway of Thailand (SRT) is suspending 57 additional train services from 26 January, 2021, as part of the nationwide effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19. These include ordinary trains, local trains, and suburban trains in the North (13 routes), Northeast (18 routes), South (12 routes), and East (14 routes).

This update includes the latest announcement from the State Railway of Thailand regarding the suspension of 57 additional train services from 26 January, 2021.
(more…)Tourism
TAT launches virtual tours to 4 top destinations in Thailand
Once inside an attraction, visitors can move around using the cursor, while some of the attractions have information about its historical background or details of items on display in both English and Thai.

Bangkok, 25 January, 2021 – The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) has launched a virtual reality tour of top attractions in four of Thailand’s leading tourism destinations comprising Bangkok, Phuket, Chiang Mai, and Surat Thani.
(more…)Tourism
Wish you were here: how the pandemic harmed tourism-dependent economies
Before COVID-19, travel and tourism had become one of the most important sectors in the world economy, accounting for 10 percent of global GDP and more than 320 million jobs worldwide.

In 1950, at the dawn of the jet age, just 25 million people took foreign trips. By 2019, that number had reached 1.5 billion, and the travel and tourism sector had grown to almost too-big-to-fail proportions for many economies.
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