Destination Thailand
Thailand’s tourism sector continues to draw tourists from around the world and has evolved into a highly successful model many countries in the region strive to emulate. The number of tourists visiting the country has roughly tripled since the start of the millennium, surging from 9.58m in 2000 to 29.89m in 2015, according to statistics from the Ministry of Tourism and Sports.
Over the past few years the ostensibly bulletproof tourism industry has displayed its characteristic resiliency after absorbing not one, but two high-profile bouts of negative publicity in 2014 and 2015 to quickly regain its forward momentum. The allure of the country’s wide array of offerings catering to broad cultural, economic and social cross sections of visitors has proven strong enough to compensate for the damaging effects of disruptive political demonstrations leading up to an eventual military coup d’état in May 2014, as well as the bombing of a popular tourist site in downtown Bangkok little more than a year later in August 2015.
In both instances, a temporary short-term decline in tourist arrivals was quickly followed by a rapid return to strong growth patterns that have characterised the industry for the past two decades. The number of tourists visiting in 2014, for example, declined modestly by 6.54% from 2013, only to see a more than 20% increase in 2015.