The global pandemic marks the most severe crisis in 60 years for Thai tourism as the number of international arrivals bottomed out at 6.7 million last year, compared with nearly 40 million in 2019.
With tight border controls, the outbound market also experienced a nosedive, from 11 million trips in 2019 to only 1 million last year.
Tour operators, a major driver in the local economy, inevitably struggled to maintain business after the virus spread last year, with vaccination unlikely to save tourism until late this year at the earliest.
Thanapol Cheewarattanaporn, a tourism veteran who worked in the industry for more than 30 years supervising a number of tour companies, said everything was razed to the ground after confronting an…
