January Tourism Up 16% One Year After Bangkok Shutdown

Tourism in Thailand was up 16% in January, just one year after the “Bangkok shutdown”. According to the Department of Tourism, the country received 2.65 million international tourists in January, up from 2.28 million the same period last year.

The increase in tourists not only surpassed last January’s numbers, but 2013’s numbers as well. During the same period that year, Thailand received just 2.31 million tourists.

Although Thailand saw an increase of tourists from many countries, it saw a dramatic decrease in Russian visitors. With the rouble seeing a tremendous drop in value, travelers are forced to stay home. Russian arrivals plummeted 45.7% to just 145,605 visitors in January. In previous months, Thailand had been seeing a year-on-year declines of 27%, 23% and 21%.

While the number of Russian visitors is on the decline, the country saw an influx of Chinese visitors. In December, the country saw an 86.5% year-on-year increase in Chinese visitors. Numbers soared again in January with 560,399 arrivals from the mainland.

Asean visitors also increased 49.3% to 622,277 year-on-year. Thailand saw just a 12% increase in Asean visitors in December and a 9% increase overall for 2014.

The country also saw a few markets rebound, including Hong Kong and Taiwan. Visitors were up 89.3% and 53.9% respectively. In 2014, those two markets plummeted 18% and 22% respectively.

The number of Japan visitors declined in December, but numbers were positive in January with the number of tourists up 5.8%.

While the increase in tourism is great news for Thailand, European tourism continues to struggle. Due in part to the sharp decline in Russian visitors, European arrivals were down 14.3% in January. Italy and Spain were the only two European countries with increased arrivals at 11.3% and 8.1% respectively. UK arrivals were down 0.5% and German arrivals up just 0.6%.