As part of its efforts to boost tourism, Thailand is planning to eliminate visa requirements for visitors from India and Taiwan starting next month until May 2024.
For the same reason, last month, Thailand also decided to eliminate visa requirements for visitors from China and Kazakhstan until February 29, 2024.
The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) has anticipated that the visa waiver program will attract an additional 700,000 new arrivals to the country.
This announcement sparked significant interest among Chinese travelers, as travel platforms in China have witnessed a tremendous increase in searches and inquiries, VisaGuide.World reports.
In the Group’s travel platform Trip.com, searches for tourism products increased by 800 percent within just 30 minutes after the news was announced. Additionally, there has been a 70 percent growth in searches for flights to Thailand compared to last week.
Further data from TAT reveals that from January to August 2023, over two million Chinese tourists and 100,000 Kazakh travelers visited Thailand.
Based on the most recent government data, from January to October 29, Thailand welcomed a total of 22 million visitors, contributing 927.5 billion baht ($25.67 billion) to the country’s economy. During this period, India ranked as Thailand’s fourth-largest source of tourists, with approximately 1.2 million arrivals, following Malaysia, China, and South Korea.
Thailand’s tourism industry saw promising growth from Indian visitors as various airlines and hospitality chains targeted this market. Thailand’s government is targeting around 28 million arrivals this year, and they have high hopes that the travel sector will help offset persistently weak exports that have held back economic growth.
Last year, Thailand recorded a total of 11.15 million tourists, surpassing the ten million target set by the authorities.
However, the global impact of COVID-19 and its various new variants, along with the necessary restrictions implemented to control its spread, caused a significant reduction in the number of international visitors in the previous years. These challenges resulted in economic losses for the country.
In 2021, Thailand saw only 428,000 visitors due to the pandemic, but the latest data for the following year shows a significant increase in the number of international tourists.
According to these data, in December 2022, the same saw a significant increase in visitor numbers, with a total of 2.24 million arrivals, in contrast to the 230,497 visitors recorded in 2021. Before the start of COVID-19, Thailand was expecting over 40 million international visitors yearly, which further proves the impact the pandemic had on the country’s tourism industry.