Unrest in Vietnam and Thailand keeps tourists away

BANGKOK — Tourists scared away from Thailand by the military coup there should quell their fear and return to a country that is their “Best Friend Forever” and even has its own Happiness Street Festival.

So says an official push to woo holidaymakers back to the Land of Smiles, where the two-month-old junta last week issued a new Constitution granting itself almost unlimited powers of arrest and repression.

“Colour your life with happiness,” exclaims the website of the Tourism Authority of Thailand. The country, which relies on tourism for a tenth of economic output, is grappling to reverse a near 37 per cent year-on-year plunge in June in foreign visitor arrivals at Bangkok’s main Suvarnabhumi Airport.

“Join hands in disseminating smiley invitations from Thai people to international friends around the world,” the website adds.

The compulsory glee is part of a wider shake-up in the tourist industry in the Mekong river region of South-east Asia, driven by an unusually politically turbulent few months.

The fallout from events ranging from the Thai military takeover to anti-Chinese riots in Vietnam has sent visitor numbers tumbling and left the region’s traditionally favoured destinations scrambling to restore demand to visit their attractions.

In Vietnam, a tourist surge this year came to a jarring halt after May’s mob mayhem ended in hundreds of foreign businesses being torched or ransacked after street protests at a dispute between Beijing and Hanoi over ownership of a group of islands.

Vietnam’s 540,000 international arrivals in June were down almost 5 per cent year on year and close to 20 per cent month on month, tourism ministry figures showed, as flights from China to popular resort areas, such as Da Nang, were cancelled.

Shanghai Spring International Travel Service, one of the city’s three largest travel agencies, said air services that normally carry more than 1,200 Chinese tourists every month to Da Nang had been scrapped for now.

Mr Li Zhi, manager for South-east Asia at China Youth Travel Service, one of the country’s biggest travel agencies, said its business was “basically suspended in Vietnam”. He said: “It’s just unsafe.”

In Thailand, the May 22 coup and subsequent crackdown on dissent have accelerated the 15 per cent year-on-year fall in international arrivals that Suvarnabhumi Airport already saw in April, after almost six months of anti-government street demonstrations.

Much of the impact has been caused by a fall in Chinese visitor numbers from more than 200,000 in June last year to fewer than 80,000 last month, a decline exacerbated by legal changes in Beijing that have made package tours more expensive because they stop Chinese tour operators from taking commission from Thai stores where holidaymakers shop.

While visitor numbers to Thai resorts popular with Westerners, such as Phuket, do not seem to have been much affected by the country’s political crisis, hotel occupancy in Bangkok in June stood at less than two-thirds of its normal 65 to 70 per cent, said Mr Chai Srivikorn, president of the Ratchaprasong Square trade association in the business district of the capital.

“Martial law has a certain impact on psychology,” he said, referring to military restrictions that others say have also pushed up travel insurance premiums. If (the junta) announces they are lifting it, it will be good for the tourists.”

Optimists on Thailand and Vietnam say visitor numbers will soon bounce back if the surface control that has returned to both countries is maintained.

But neither nation can be complacent during an era of growing competition from less-visited but fast-growing neighbours, including Cambodia and Myanmar, which are trying to develop independent tourist industries and shed their historical reliance on centres such as Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City as feeder hubs.

Mr Visothy So, director of the promotion department at Cambodia’s tourism ministry, said the government still expected double-digit growth in international visitor numbers this year, thanks to growing numbers of direct flights from outside the Mekong region and arrivals from Vietnam by land. THE FINANCIAL TIMES