Future direction of Thai tourism may change
The trend for outbound tourism may change after AEC 2015 because Thai students’ schedule and school breaks have to adjust to correspond with other ASEAN countries. Inbound tourism is predicted to witness the least change and Asian tourists are expected to dominate due to an influx of Chinese tourists. However, political problems will impact many tourism infrastructure development projects such as high speed train, improvement of rail link nationwide, and the new phase of the Suvarnabhumi airport to increase capacity as well as technology development such as digital TV and 4G internet technology. There is optimism that by the end of the forecast period, the political situation should be more stable, so that Thai tourism will be able to see a new record of arrivals over the forecast period.