Enhancing Sustainable Tourism in Thailand: A Policy Perspective

Abstract

The goal of tourism development is to bring foreign currency into the national economy and to distribute income at the local level. In Thailand, the government sets an annual tourism target of the number of foreign visitors. Although the target seems to keep increasing each year along with rising advertising budgets, the number of visitors has not kept pace. For example, the target for 2006 was 14 million visitors but the actual number was 12 million. Conventionally, to attract international tourists, policy makers in Thailand prefer spending more on advertising than evaluating the tourism development process. The chapter identifies both sustainable and unsustainable practices in the tourism industry in Thailand and proposes policies to move the industry in new sustainable direction.