Is mass tourism a thing of the past in Thailand?

Is mass tourism a thing of the past in Thailand as the streets of the most popular tourist destinations are unnervingly quiet.
Along Chaweng’s Beach Road, a usually raucous party area, shuttered shops stretch into the distance.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, it was buzzing with traffic. Now, taxi drivers sit on the roadside, with little hope of finding customers.

Where bikini-clad sunseekers once browsed souvenir shops and drank at neon-lit bars, a lone street dog stretches on the pavement.

Elsewhere, swathes of Samui’s idyllic, sandy white beaches are almost entirely free of people.

About 40 million tourists flocked to Thailand last year, drawn by its spectacular coastlines, ornate temples and famous cuisine.

In 2022, the country will struggle to attract even a quarter of that number, according to the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT).

Tourism ground to a halt in April, when Thailand imposed a ban on all incoming passenger flights. The country – which has so far managed to contain Covid-19, recording 3,255 cases and 58 deaths – is discussing travel bubbles with low-risk neighbouring countries, but no one knows when these might be established. Borders remain shut to almost all foreign tourists.

The travel sector has survived devastating crises before, including the 2004 tsunami, bird flu and Sars outbreaks.

But the impact of the coronavirus pandemic is beyond comparison, says Tanes Petsuwan, deputy governor for marketing communication at the TAT.

During previous crises, revenue dropped by around a fifth, he said. This year, the coronavirus pandemic is expected to cause a 80% fall in revenues. “It’s a huge impact,” he said.

To make matters worse, Thailand’s economy has become even more reliant on tourism, accounting for almost 20% of GDP, according to Tanes. About 4.4 million people are employed across the industry – in transport, travel agencies, restaurants and hotels.

In Samui, many have gone for months without work. Before coronavirus, Jarunee Kasorn, who works in a local massage parlour in Chaweng, says her colleagues would welcome up to 90 clients a day.

They’re one of the few businesses to reopen on Beach Road, but a whole day can go by without a single customer. “If there are no tourists, then there’s no business,” she said.

Most of the shop’s 20 staff have left the island altogether, and returned to their family homes elsewhere in Thailand.

Though modest social assistance payments were offered to workers during lockdown, this is no longer available.

“Many people say we won’t die from Covid, but we will die because we are not able to eat,” says Ta Sasiwinom, who has just reopened her stall at an outdoor market in Fishermen’s Village, known as the walking street. The past few months have been a struggle for her and her two daughters. “We cook more cheaply – eating egg and rice, rice and egg,” she says.

Parts of the market, and the nearby beach, have begun to return to life. There are groups of visitors and locals peering at the discounted stalls, but it is still nowhere near as busy as it would usually be.

Among those shopping are tourists stuck abroad, foreign residents living in Thailand, and Thais – who the government has encouraged to travel domestically through a stimulus package that offers subsidised hotel bookings.

The scheme, and a looming long weekend, has provided a welcome boost, says Lloyd Maraville, general manager of Nora Buri resort and spa.

Of the hotel’s 144 rooms, about 100 are empty, though this will fall to 85 over the holiday.

Government measures, he adds, “might sustain hotels for a while but it will not be a long-term [solution].” Rooms have been booked at far below the usual rates. “Profit is out of the question at this moment, we just want to maintain the resort,” he says.

Tanes believes that when tourism is able to begin again, the industry will be altered completely.

He hopes for positive change. “I think this is a good time for Thailand to upskill the human resources of the industry to move Thailand [away] from [being an] overcrowded tourist destination,” he says. Mass tourism, and the dependence on large tour groups, he argues, will be a thing of the past.

In Samui, businesses are focused on survival for now. Just last month it was announced that nearly 100 local hotel owners had been forced to sell. Many more remain shut indefinitely.

“I’ve lived here for 20 years and I’m shocked, I never thought it could be like this,” says Rattanaporn Chadakarn, who runs a stall at the walking street.

No one knows if the Great Panic will continue. For now, she adds, everyone is just waiting for the skies to reopen.

Source - BangkokJack

VISA AGENT

Strange disease threatens Caribbean coral reef

The breathtaking reds, yellows and purples of the Mesoamerican Reef have been turning sickly white, leading researchers on a desperate hunt to understand and fight the mysterious disease killing the Caribbean's corals.

In a little over a year, the Mexican Caribbean has lost more than 30 percent of its corals to a little-understood illness called SCTLD, or stony coral tissue loss disease, which causes them to calcify and die.

Experts warn the disease could kill a large part of the Mesoamerican Reef, a magnificent arc of more than 1,000 kilometers of coral shared by Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras.

SCTLD has put the region in a bind: it could potentially devastate the vital tourism industry around the reef, the second-largest in the world after Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

And yet, it is highly possible that too much tourism is in fact fueling the problem, scientists say.

SCTLD, which has also been infecting coral off the coast of Florida since 2014, was first detected in the Mexican Caribbean in July last year, near the reef's northern tip.

It has since spread 400 kilometers to the south, reaching Belize and causing more coral loss than occurred in the past 40 years in the region, according to the environmental group Healthy Reefs for Healthy People.

The disease takes just weeks to kill off coral tissue that took decades to grow, said Melina Soto, the organization's coordinator in Mexico.

"If we keep going at this rate, this ecosystem is going to collapse in the next five to 10 years," she told AFP.

Brink of extinction

Scientists say SCTLD is even more dangerous than coral bleaching, another damaging condition that has affected reefs around the world, including the Great Barrier Reef.

Bleaching happens when environmental changes, such as warming ocean temperatures, cause corals -- which are colonies of tiny animals -- to expel the microscopic algae known as zooxanthellae that live inside them and give them their vibrant colors.

A reef can recover from coral bleaching if its environment recovers in time.

But SCTLD is fatal.

"It's a complete detachment of the coral tissue, which dies and leaves behind a white skeleton," said Claudia Padilla, a scientist at CRIP Puerto Morelos, a marine biology research center on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula.

To the untrained eye, the impact of the disease is not highly visible yet.

"They looked marvelous to me. I would never have thought they were dying, like the experts say," said Emanuel Fernandez, 34, an Argentine chemical engineer, after a snorkeling tour off the coast of Cancun, the region's most famous resort.

But the impact is all too visible to experts.

"You used to go diving and see these thriving colonies (of corals). Now they're all dead," said Padilla.

Twenty-five of the region's 40 coral species have been affected, she said. Of those, three are on the brink of going extinct in the region.

Researchers are currently building up a DNA bank of the endangered corals, hoping they can one day bring them back from extinction in the wild if needed.

Too much tourism?

Scientists are racing to understand what causes SCTLD.

One prime suspect is poor water quality, caused by sewage and a recent surge of decomposing sargassum seaweed -- another environmental emergency in the region.

Another likely factor is the chemicals in tourists' sunscreen, which the authorities have now banned.

"Many studies indicate that a particle found in sunscreen, oxybenzone, impedes the corals' reproduction," said Christopher Gonzalez, regional director for the national parks commission.

This month, authorities temporarily closed three sections of the reef, Palancar, Colombia and El Cielo, which receive thousands of visitors each year.

Now, government officials, the tourism industry and residents are forced to find a delicate balance: a level of tourism that will neither kill off the reef nor the economy.

Around 725,000 tourists have visited the Mexican Caribbean's reefs so far this year, a similar figure to previous years, according to officials.

"If we lose the reef, we lose our main economic activity: tourism," warned Maria del Carmen Garcia, head of the Coral Reef National Park in Puerto Morelos.

Source - The JakartaPost 

.

#Thailand - Park’s special status ‘at risk’ over drilling hole

Thailand’s Sri Thep Historical Park in Phetchabun may lose the chance to become a World Heritage Site if the government allows an oil company to build a drilling hole nearby, according to Wison Kosotanon, president of the Phetchabun Culture Council. 

 His warning came after a company, ECO Orient Resources (Thailand), called earlier this week for a public hearing process in order to prepare an Environment Impact Assessment report. The company plans to build the drilling hole near the 1,300 year-old Khao Kwang Nok Stupa located inside the park. 

“The new drilling hole is too close – just over 100 metres to the historical stupa – it will be harmful to our heritage and will lose us the chance to get the recognition as a World Heritage Site by Unesco,” Wison explained.

.

Booking your Flight, Hotel or Resort now  

.

Opinion is divided over the company’s application – at the first public hearing, many culture experts and local officials  opposed its construction and claimed they had concerns about the cultural and environmental impacts it would have, but some villagers supported it in the hope it might provide them with employment. 

Anan Choochote, director of the Culture Ministry’s Fine Arts Department, has assigned his archaeological teams to study the merits of the company’s application.

“Our officers are studying its impact. If there is harm to our heritage, we will work with other governmental agencies to stop the project,” Anan said. “We are now gathering more information and we will submit it to Unesco later this year.”

The proposal for Sri Thep to be listed as a World Heritage Site is expected to be approved by the cabinet and the National Committee on the World Heritage Commission Convention on March 8.

Anan added that Sri Thep Historical Park had been listed as a national archaeological site since 1935 and also dates back some 2,500 years like prehistoric Ban Chiang. Therefore, he said, it also warranted being listed as a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco). 

Ban Chiang, an archeological site in Nong Han District, Udon Thani Province, has been on the Unesco World Heritage list since 1992.

.

 .

Following the Phetchabun Culture Council’s controversial opposition to the drilling project, ECO Orient Resources may postpone the second round of public hearings currently due to be held in April.

“As the result of the objection raised at the public hearing, senior officials at our head office will carefully study whether the firm should hold a second round of public hearings or drop it,” said company spokesman Navin Panphan.

The film has been drilling for oil in Sri Thep for more than a decade but the latest plan to build a new hole near the stupa has raised concerns on cultural, environmental and tourism grounds.

Source - TheNation

 

How climate change threatens #Indonesia's marine #Tourism

While the Earth has only warmed around 0.74 degrees Celsius over the last 100 years, this small temperature increase is affecting ocean ecosystems and could impact upon the global marine tourism industry.

Coral reef tourism has a global value of US$36 billion per year, according to a scientific study mapping the global value and distribution of coral reef tourism. This study, published in the Marine Policy journal in August 2017, concluded that 30 percent of the world’s reefs are valuable to tourism.

Indonesia has a thriving coral reef tourism industry and also has the second largest manta ray tourism industry in the world, with an annual value of over $15 million.

While coral bleaching events and ocean acidification are well-documented effects of climate change, there are other stressors upon coral reefs that could undermine these valuable tourism industries.

Sea level rises, leading to coastal erosion, plus stronger and more frequent storms typical of the current climate, smother and destroy coral reef structures. Heavy rainfall cause land-based pollutants and nutrients to wash into the ocean, resulting in algal blooms and a reduction in available light at reefs. Changing ocean currents also affect reefs, by altering the connectivity of geographically distant reefs and water temperature profiles. These changes can lead to a lack of food sources and interrupt reef species’ ability to breed.

If left unchecked, these complex effects could reduce the value of marine tourism significantly as the quality of world-class Indonesian dive sites and idyllic tourism destinations deteriorate.

Thankfully a new global partnership to conserve the ocean, announced at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland on Jan. 25, should help address this. This new partnership, Friends of Ocean Action, will consist of leaders in science, technology, business and non-governmental groups aiming to deliver the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 14: to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources.

Individuals can also do their part to minimize the effects of climate change by reducing their carbon footprint. Measures such as driving less, reducing waste and purchasing energy efficient appliances or light bulbs are easy ways to help. Indonesia’s coral reefs can be protected with simple measures such as using fewer garden chemicals that may run-off into the ocean, choosing sustainable seafood and practicing good reef etiquette.

READ MORE 

BUY ASIAN TRAVEL TICKETS ONLINE