At Lunar New Year, Thailand pines for its missing Chinese tourists as Covid-19 keeps them away ahead of the Winter Olympics
At a cliffside restaurant on Thailand's Koh Larn, where squat teak dining tables overlook an empty white-sand bay, manager Sutthiea Saengsaswi says the last time Chinese tourists were around for the Lunar New Year celebrations her takings went up to around US$6,000 a day. Now they are just US$300 a day.
But this year, for the second year running, there are no Chinese to be seen. Strict quarantine measures Beijing has implemented ahead of the Winter Olympics as part of its zero-tolerance approach to Covid-19 have kept them away.
From Koh Larn restaurants to cabaret shows in Pattaya - a 45 minute ferry ride away - Phuket resorts and Bangkok night markets, entire mini-economies constructed to tap what once appeared to be a bottomless pit of Chinese money have collapsed or been forced to pivot to domestic visitors.
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Thai tourist authorities say two million Chinese tourists a year piled into Pattaya before the pandemic. Around 4,000 of them made the day trip to Koh Larn each day on package tours run with conveyor belt-like efficiency: a beach stop, a quick snorkel, souvenirs and a set meal at restaurants like Sutthiea's workplace at the Sangwan Beach Villa.
"Since they've gone, we've lost 80 per cent of our income," she said.
In 2019 Thailand welcomed around 11 million Chinese tourists, over a quarter of the overall number of overseas visitors. Then Covid-19 hit and the Chinese visitors vanished.
"But we can't just wait for them to return," said Sutthiea, whose restaurant opened six years ago specifically to cater to Chinese tourists and at its peak pulled between 500 to 1,000 diners a day.
"If you're in tourism, the local market is the only hope. So we built a boutique resort last year to attract Thai tourists."
One beach over, a pier used by Chinese package tours is empty and souvenir markets - some three floors high - built by Chinese entrepreneurs are now shells.
Instead, beach bars with live music and elegant canvas deck chairs have crept to life on a wide sand beach to cater to Thais who fill the island on weekends.
The challenge is to replace the volume of high-spending Chinese tourists with repeat visits by lower-income Thais as well as the other foreigners expected to pour back into the kingdom as worries over the Omicron variant fade.
"To attract Thais restaurants are turning to coffee shops with Instagrammable check-in spots, or a menu a little more fancy than the Thai classics dishes that the Chinese love," Kajorndet Apichartrakul, the director of the Tourism Authority of Thailand in Pattaya said.
Thailand, with a large and influential population descended from China, is still marking the Lunar New Year as a public holiday with red lanterns strung across beach walks, while muted celebrations will be held in Chinatowns from Bangkok to Phuket Town.
"Tourist businesses are still hopeful the Chinese will come back one day," Kajorndet added.
"There were no real seasons with Chinese tourists, there were only more tourists during the Chinese holidays like the Lunar New Year and Golden Week."
Southeast Asia's second largest economy has felt the absence of tourists: GDP contracted by 6.1 per cent in the first year of the pandemic as borders shut, with government forecasts for the 2021 figure suggesting growth of just 1.2 per cent.
Omicron stunted the hopes for a quick start in the first quarter this year, but there is still optimism that Thailand can return to growth by the end of the year, helped by an easing of restrictions on tourist entries.
But analysts say Chinese visitors are unlikely to return in significant numbers until at least 2023, with Beijing taking no chances with the virus.
Not everyone on Koh Larn misses Thailand's biggest visitors.
Motorcycle taxi driver Sunthorn Homsin said the money spread around a little more evenly without the package tours and Chinese middlemen who took a cut from the speedboat operators, restaurants and shops in exchange for driving tourist traffic their way.
"Chinese money is spent with Chinese people ... not much makes it back to ordinary Thais," he said.
But even Koh Larn locals cut off from the main spenders on their island know someone who did well from mass Chinese tourism.
"A lot of people here got very rich," said 62-year-old Fa, grilling shrimp in a local night market.
"The absence of the Chinese affects us all. We want them back."
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
Copyright (c) 2022. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
