Risk & Crisis Management in Tourism Sector:
Recovery from Crisis
in the OIC Member Countries
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Thailand has continued to diversify its tourism offer in more recent years in response to the
increasing sophistication of mature markets. Its products now include significant land and sea-
based adventure tourism and ecotourism, wellness tourism (including medical tourism and spas),
cultural and heritage tourism (including cultural festivals, village-based tourism and three cultural
World Heritage Sites), a strongMICE sector, and good-quality shopping and entertainment tourism,
especially in Bangkok, which in 2012, 2013 and 2016 was the world’s most-visited city (it received
almost 22 million visitors in 2016). Sports tourism – especially golf – was given a higher profile
when the Ministry of Tourism became the ‘Ministry of Tourism and Sports’ in 2002. The country’s
industry is well-placed to tap into ‘creative’ and experiential forms of tourism, in which tourists
engage more strongly with local cultures and with their hosts. Wattanacharoensil and Schuckert
(2015) point out that this links to the ‘experience-seeking’ society, i.e. the concept of enjoying
experiences rather than passively consuming products and services.
By 2015Thailandhad reached6th place in theworld rankings of receipts frominternational tourism
with US$ 44.6 billion generated in that year, making it the 2nd largest tourism earner in Asia after
China) and ranked 11th in terms of international visitor arrivals, with 29.9million arrivals (UNWTO,
2016).
A significant feature of the current tourism landscape in Thailand is domestic tourism, with local
visitors accounting for an estimated 80% of all trips in 2012 and 45% of revenues (Suansri and
Richards, 2013). There has been a deliberate attempt to target ‘Generation Y’3 , includingmarketing
community-based tourism to young professionals as a way of fostering links between urban and
rural communities (Richards, pers. comm., 6 April 2017). Diaspora tourism is a further factor, in
that when Thais working abroad come home on holiday, they bring with them not only spending
power from their overseas earnings but the expectations of leisure consumption learned in their
new countries of residence (Scheyvens, 2007).
In 2017 the situation appeared stable. Tourism became Thailand’s largest contributor of foreign
exchange in 1982 and in now contributes around 20% of GDP. A 2016 industry report on Thailand
commented that many international hotel companies were expanding, and that the country
remained attractive to investors and developers, with strong investment planned into the transport
infrastructure and hotel sector into 2018 and beyond (Business Monitor International, 2016).
There are forecast to be around 40 million international arrivals per year in 2020.
5.3.2. Crises Affecting Thai tourism
Despite the apparent success of the tourism industry, Cohen (2014) points out that even by the
1980s it was obvious that rapid mass tourism development, poor planning, lack of enforcement of
regulations, unscrupulous business practices and a failure of essential infrastructure to keep pace
with development had led to a number of unwanted effects including overcrowding in some
destinations; negative social impacts, including reduced social cohesion and economic inequality,
abuse of human rights and displacement of people from their traditional lands in favour of resort
3 There are no precise dates for when this cohort starts or ends. Demographers and researchers typically use the early 1980s as
starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years.