TravTalk India Online Magazine
Since opening of its borders in January this year, Thailand welcomed more than three million international tourists, including 10 per cent from India. Now, Tourism Authority of Thailand has a new strategy up its sleeve to help achieve its new target for this year – one million visitors from India.
Hazel Jain
Tanes Petsuwan, Deputy Governor (International Marketing), Asia & South Pacific, Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT), was recently in Mumbai to interact with the travel trade and talk about the focus areas for the destination going forward. “Thailand is now completely open,” he announced, adding, “Entering Thailand is now as easy as it was pre-COVID. All the Indian visitors need are air tickets and hotel bookings. There are no restrictions or quarantine requirements for Thailand. Once you prove that you are fully vaccinated, you are free to enter.”
Petsuwan also shared that since opening borders on January 1, 2022 Thailand has till date already welcomed more than three million international tourists. “Of this, more than 10 per cent are from India. Which means we have already welcomed more than 300,000 Indian visitors. Of this, 30 per cent traffic is just from Mumbai. By the end of this year, we expect to receive at least 1 million tourists just from Indian market,” he shared.
Focussed strategy for India
Speaking about the strategy for short-haul international markets such as India, he says, “We try to identify good, high-quality products for the Indian market. This also includes promoting new ways in which they can do responsible tourism. We try to go for the new segment which is millennials and the digital nomads. We will also be focusing on the incentive as well as the corporate segments, which is growing from India. For this, we will tap not just the metro cities of India like Bengaluru and Kolkata but also others like Pune, Ahmedabad, Kochi, Indore, Vizag and Guwahati – touching all regions of India.”
Increased seat capacity
Petsuwan shared that Thailand has also seen a lot of development of new tourism infrastructure in the last few years. “Visitors will now see some new things: the second phase of airport is now under construction, and it will be finished by next year. we will also have the new expressway and the new underpass. We are also focusing on building new partnerships in India. TAT will be very happy to work with airlines that fly to Thailand. We have a huge focus on increasing airline seat capacity. During COVID, we lost a lot of seat capacity between India and Thailand because of no flight operations. Our target is now to resume seat capacity above 80 per cent so that we can touch one million Indian tourists. The key is we resume the flights, which is why we have keen interest in forming new partnerships with airlines apart from the ones we already work with,” he says.
