Thailand wants to be a "premium" vacation spot

The Thai government says that hotels and other businesses in the country shouldn't try to get tourists by offering cheap prices.

Reuters says that the government would rather have the tourism industry promote Thailand as a great place to visit.

Deputy Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said at a tourism event in Bangkok that he didn't want people to say they came to Thailand because it was cheap.

Charnvirakul said that businesses could even do better if prices went up. "Sell premium. The higher the price, the more people will buy it. If not, Louis Vuitton wouldn't sell anything "he said.

The Thai government also wants to ask hotels to raise their prices for foreign tourists so that they are similar to what they were before the COVID-19 pandemic. Bloomberg says that Thai residents would still be able to pay lower prices, which would help to promote domestic tourism.

Bloomberg got information from the Thai government that said more than 2 million people visited the country in the first half of 2022. The numbers show that 221,000 of these visitors came from India, which is more than any other country.

So far in 2022, about 185,000 tourists from Malaysia are the second largest group of foreign visitors to Thailand. There have been about 121,000 tourists from both the UK and Singapore, and about 103,000 from the US.

Thailand expects to have about 9 million visitors by the end of 2022, which is still a lot less than the nearly 40 million tourists who came to the country in 2019.