Look beyond Chinese

Re: “Look to global tourists”, (PostBag, Aug 11).

Edward Kitlertsirivatana in the letter above makes a good point. Most Chinese tourists come here on hugely discounted group tours, where they are shuttled off to predetermined sites, not going anywhere on their own.

They only seem interested in talking to their fellow Chinese brethren and do not seem to care about Thai culture.

They especially seem to enjoy going shopping, looking for products that they can sell back home, or buying hugely popular brand name items that are hard to find in China.

Further, it seems that the tour guides are Chinese, and that the tourists stay at mostly Chinese controlled businesses. So basically, Thai people benefit little from these tourists.

Hence, the tourist industry is not as strong as the numbers seem to suggest. The Prayut Chan-o-cha government likes to brag about how the country keeps breaking new records each year in terms of the number of tourist arrivals.

But based on my personal experience and talking to other expats, it seems to be the case that there are far less white tourists coming here compared to 10 or even five years ago.

As the above pointed out, the Thai government needs to make a more concentrated effort in attracting this segment, as they travel individually or in small individual groups and enjoy visiting small Thai businesses.

Eventually, the Chinese are going to tire of coming here, or even if they do continue coming to this country in great numbers, it isn’t going to benefit Thailand much, as the Chinese continue travelling together on group tours.

Therefore, it is important that the Thai tourist industry caters to as wide a segment of tourists as possible for the good of the economy. PAUL Khon Kaen