Travel to Thailand has a long history. Tourism as an industry, however, developed after the Second World War and experienced a massive growth only in the last quarter of the century. Even though some advertisers still seek to lure tourists to the country by presenting it as a recent arrival on the tourist scene, Thailand is by now, even from a global perspective, a mature tourist destination. It is certainly one of the touristically most developed countries in the Third World. As the number of foreign visitors passed the ten million mark, it is an appropriate time to examine the major trends and transformations of Thai tourism, and indicate some of its principal consequences. Although Thai tourism has been studied from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, such a comprehensive examination has not yet been undertaken.
Tourism as secular travel in search of novelty and change, was unknown in pre-modern Thailand. Thais, however, enjoyed travelling, mostly on pilgrimages to Buddhist sanctuaries and shrines. Such trips still remain very popular with the rural folk and the lower urban classes, although they are often combined with other, more mundane, tourist interests. Among the urban middle and upper classes, domestic tourism grew considerably with the recent spread of motorization. The acquisition of second homes in remote rural settings and international travel, are the principal contemporary developments among these classes: in 1993, for example, about one million Thais took trips abroad.