Pressmediaofindia
Related Articles
25-02-2026
BANGKOK: Resorts are near capacity in Pattaya, Bangkok restaurants are doing a roaring trade and the strict time slots to visit the Louis Vuitton pop-up “hotel” in the Thai capital are fully booked.
As this year’s Lunar New Year holiday draws to a close, Thailand’s tourist businesses are totting up the receipts from what many hope will be an enduring rebound in Chinese visitors.
More than 30,000 Chinese visitors have arrived each day since the start of January. The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) forecasts 241,000 Chinese travelers during the February 13 to 22 holiday, bringing the total since the beginning of 2026 to more than 1 million.
The TAT has invested heavily this year to claw back a crucial cohort that retreated from the Southeast Asian nation due to safety fears over scams, economic worries at home and a strong baht making alternatives like Vietnam more enticing.
An army of Chinese influencers has been hired targeting multigenerational family groups and Gen Z travelers who shun large tours. This supports the country’s biggest ever tourism promotion campaign launched last month starring Lalisa “Lisa” Manobal, the Thai-born member of the K-pop girl group Blackpink.
While the final Lunar New Year arrivals data are yet to be released, anecdotally the investment appears to have paid off.
“Pattaya is buzzing with a significant increase in tourists compared with last year, a very positive sign,” Boonanant Pattanasin, adviser to the president of the Pattaya Business and Tourism Association, told This Week in Asia.
“In areas popular with Chinese visitors, booking rates have reached 75-80 per cent of total capacity, consisting mostly of FIT (Free Independent Travelers) and families,” he said, adding the Chinese market remains “vital” for the eastern resort city.
On RedNote, social media posts zipped around from Bangkok’s Iconsiam shopping centre showing fireworks for the Year of the Horse and the Louis Vuitton pop-up hotel in Bangkok’s Chinatown, which is actually a shop requiring pre-booking to visit but has proved extremely popular with Chinese visitors.
“The festive atmosphere is so strong I’m moved to tears,” a user said in a post with an image of a lion dance at Iconsiam.
Others bemoaned the impact of the stubbornly strong baht, which has damaged the reputation of what was once seen as among Southeast Asia’s most pocket-friendly destinations over recent months.
“Thailand’s current prices are almost catching up with Singapore’s,” another user said. Chinese visitor numbers slumped by nearly 30 per cent to around 4.5 million last year, according to Thai tourism authorities.
This year, they want a rebound to more than 6 million holidaymakers from the country.
The Thai baht remains a sticking point beyond the control of tourism authorities, grounding travel operators in a new world of quality, high-spending visitors over the pile-them-high culture of pre-pandemic tourism.
“At the end of the day it’s a question of preference, do you want to get a new market like Vietnam or something you know already,” Thienprasit Chaiyapatranun, president of Thailand’s hotels association, told broadcaster TNN on Saturday.
“We have to compete over the long term…
We’re better than them in terms of services and people can come to Thailand year round” but in the febrile environment of Chinese tourism where economic sentiment brings booms and busts to overseas travel, safety worries slash bookings and nationalist ructions can close down entire markets nearly overnight, Thailand may be set to gain this year at Japan’s expense. (Int’l News Desk)
