Travel industry hopes for return of Chinese tourists

When Beijing recently announced that after three years of pandemic, the Chinese were finally allowed to travel to other countries again without major hurdles, a fierce debate broke out in the vacation paradise of Thailand. On the one hand, the country’s economy is dependent on guests from the People’s Republic; on the other hand, the government had concerns about the Covid wave in China. In the end, the interests of the travel industry prevailed. Around eleven million visitors from China flocked to Thailand in the year before the pandemic. This makes it by far the most popular foreign vacation destination for Chinese, followed by Japan, Vietnam and South Korea.