|
|
Trends in Thai tourism
Massification: From Personalized to Impersonal Tourism
In the last quarter century the foreign tourist arrivals to
Thailand increased about ten times: from about 600,000 in 1970 to six million in 1993. Not only
have more tourists visited the country, but they tended to stay an even longer time: from less than five days in 1970, to about seven days in the 1990s.
The growth of foreign tourism was accompanied by a considerable expansion of domestic tourism. Its size is difficult to estimate but there is little doubt
that, with the growth of motor travel, Thai tourists constituted an ever more significant component of the total number of visitors to touristic attractions,
and of users of tourist amenities and facilities. Recently, however, the expanding opportunities for foreign travel for Thais may have hurt domestic tourism
somewhat.
The growth of tourism was accompanied and facilitated by a corresponding expansion of the
tourist infrastructure. Transportation services, both international
and domestic, grew in scope and variety. The number of airlines serving Thailand increased, and so did the number of flights; with the introduction of big aircraft,
the "payload", the number of tourists arriving in each flight, grew. In response, the
Bangkok airport facilities were expanded and streamlined; international airports were inaugurated in Chiang Mai in the North and in Phuket in the South; tourist transportation and accommodation facilities were improved: internal flights and night buses facilitated tourist movement within the country; the hotel industry (especially on its upper, luxurious ranges) expanded at an accelerated rate,
with large hotels in Thailand, offering a wide range of shops and services, dominating the industry. Transnational chains penetrated the local market as partial owners of large, luxurious hotels.
A wide variety of specialized, tourism-oriented services, ranging from restaurants, bars and shops, to theme parks and golf clubs emerged in response to the growing flow of tourists. Travel companies offered a widening variety of tours and sight-seeing excursions, in response to diversified interests. Thailand has "arrived" in force on the global tourist map. However, concomitantly with the growth of mass tourism and the rapid economic development of the country, a growing gap emerged between the touristic image of Thailand, as promoted by TAT and the travel companies, and the realities of the country. This did not deter the less discerning mass tourists, who continued to converge on a small number of destinations, especially Bangkok,
the Eastern Seaboard "Riviera" with its hub in Pattaya, and Phuket. But the more discerning tourists began to push out into the remoter, less developed regions of the country, engendering or abetting
the process of geographical expansion of the tourist industry.
The significance of the rapid and continuous growth of tourism in Thailand was not merely quantitative. It brought in its wake the gradual depersonalization of the relationships between the locals and the visitors. The unforced friendliness and hospitality extended to strangers has declined, as attitudes to tourists changed and as visitors were increasingly seen as a source of gain, profit or income, rather than an occasion for meaningful and satisfying socializing. The distance between professionalized hosting and service personnel and their guests increased; the famous "Thai smile" became part of the professional role performance. Tourists were ever more isolated in tourist enclaves, without significant contact with the locals, whom they either merely observed on their excursions or encountered as subservient but distant service personnel. Even as most relationships with tourists became depersonalized, conmen profited from establishing friendly contacts with foreigners only to relieve them of their money.
For some visitors, Thailand therefore became a "turn-off".
Expansion: From Centralized to Dispersed Tourism
Tourist attractions and facilities were initially concentrated primarily in Bangkok and its surroundings. This concentration reflected the preponderancy of Bangkok over all other regions of the country, as well as the tourism policy of the authorities, which emphasized the aggregate foreign currency income from tourism, and paid little attention to its distribution over the country's regions. The best-known "marked" attractions,
such as major Buddhist temples, the floating markets and some important historical and archaeological sites, were located primarily in Bangkok and its vicinity, while the rest of the country exerted a more diffuse attractiveness on adventurous travellers, but few of its attractions were touristically "marked". However, thanks to a relatively well developed infrastructure, tourism spread gradually and spontaneously throughout much of the country, even though initially only to a few major localities, such as the city of Chiang Mai, and only afterwards into more outlying areas. The early arrivals to more outlying places were mostly drifters and other youth tourists. This kind of tourist, indeed, first penetrated the hill tribe area of the north and the islands of the south, serving as the spearhead for the expansion of more routinized tourism into the outlying regions.
With the expansion of tourism, a north-to-south "tourism-axis" has gradually emerged. At its center lies the capital Bangkok. In the north, it is anchored on the city of Chiang Mai, in the south on the island of Phuket, the two major destinations, outside Bangkok, served by international airports. With the penetration of mass tourism into these centers and their surrounding areas, tourism spread out even further along the north-south axis: in the south, overseas tourism spread towards the Malaysian border, especially
the province of Krabi adjoining Phuket, and further down, to the island of Tarutao and the border town of Betong in the extreme south; it thus crosses paths with Malaysian tourism moving in the opposite direction, whose center is the bustling southern town of Haadyai. In the North, tourism spread towards the "Golden Triangle", the provinces adjoining the Burmese and Laotian borders,
and especially to the cities of Chiang Rai, and, more recently, Mae Hong Son and their surroundings. Along the north-to-south axis itself, a growing number of new destinations were established, especially on the western coast of the Gulf of Siam in the upper south. Tourism also spread out laterally from the principal axis as new tourist routes branched off from it. Among these, the one leading west to the city of Kanchanaburi and the valley of the river Kwai towards the Three Pagodas Pass on the Burmese border, is the most important recent development.
Concomitantly with the development of the axis, tourism also spread beyond the surroundings of Bangkok into the region of the Eastern Seaboard, along the coast of the Gulf of Siam. The hub of this expansion was the resort city of Pattaya, from which vacationing tourism extended along the beaches and the islands of the Gulf, gradually approaching the Cambodian border; tourist developers, drawn to the area by the large number of vacationers, also created tourist attractions inland, so that tourism, at first concentrated along a narrow strip of beaches, is now becoming an area-wide phenomenon.
Tourism has presently reached into all major regions of the country. Only the populous but impoverished Northeast (Isan), an area of hilly rural landscapes
and Cambodian temple ruins, remained touristically relatively undeveloped; recently, however, substantial efforts were made to develop tourism to that region.
Since the expansion of tourism into new localities was mostly a spontaneous affair, its growth was incremental. The first tourists at a destination generally enjoyed the hospitality of the local population or used the local facilities; tourist-oriented services, such as restaurants and guest houses, often grew out of these beginnings, and were initially small-scale and locally owned enterprises. Higher quality facilities, and especially outside-owned, international standard hotels, came only at a much later stage when the tourist potential of the locality appeared proven and the risks of large-scale investment consequently seemed lower. At this stage, the locality had "arrived" on the international tourist map, and become a destination for mass tourism.
Such destinations, in turn, became centers of the touristic penetration into the surrounding areas; the dominant pattern was that the large-scale, luxurious facilities and the most varied tourist services were located at such centers, which, as in the cases of Pattaya
and Phuket town, took on an increasingly urban character; while the simpler facilities offering less diversified services were located in their surroundings. However, once an area proved successful in the attraction of mass tourists, luxurious hotels and resorts were often implanted into remote, as yet underdeveloped sites in the area,
as for example, the Laguna Phuket complex, located on a previously empty beach, remote from other touristic areas on Phuket island,
or the Dusit Island resort, implanted on a riverine island, on the fringes of the city of Chiang Rai.
Thailand Tourism Part 3
|
