Recovery of Asia’s tourism economies comes down to ‘bums on seats’ – aircraft passenger seats – as well as a few border crossings and sea arrivals.
A lot of the traditional feeder economies for Asian tourism are currently either in recession, or under stress due to geopolitical circumstances, or having lingering Covid issues.
An interesting comparison can be made to some of Thailand’s regional tourist competitors and the number of monthly arrivals in recent months. These are just total international arrival numbers – not all arrivals are tourists of course.
According to the figures published on the Trading Economics website, Thailand is leading the way in Asia as the number one traveller destination at this time. Vietnam, Singapore and Indonesia are also starting to recover their tourism industries, albeit well below their pre-Covid arrivals.
If you extrapolated Thailand’s international arrivals from July over a full year, the numbers would represent around 25% of the total international arrivals in 2019 when nearly 40 million people visited Thailand.
Thailand
July – 767,497
June – 521,410
Cambodia
July – 64,225
June – 50,411
Hong Kong
July – 41,112
June – 18,710
South Korea
July – 99,999
June – 81,851
Indonesia
July – 345,438
June – 212,332
Japan
July – 120,400
June – 147,000
Malaysia
July – 41,496
June – 26,760
Philippines
July – 254,312
June – 206,393
Singapore
July – 543,732
June – 418,310
Vietnam*
July – 352,579
June – 236,677
* The Vietnamese numbers have been updated correctly from another website
