Stuart from Travelfish Talks How (and how not) to Help Tourism Recover Sustainably [S7.E14]

Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - Side by foot.
 
Greg (00:00:03) - And now on this episode, we welcome back our old pal Stuart McDonald from Travel Fish to talk about the recovery of tourism in Asia.
 
Ed (00:00:12) - So if you have questions about the latest developments in overtourism, secondary destinations and much more, you'll take this episode of the Bangkok Podcast.
 
Greg (00:00:34) - Someone corrupt. And welcome to the Bangkok Podcast. My name is Greg Jorgensen, a Canadian who came to Thailand in 2001 and is finally trying to design his family crest, but has to figure out how to tastefully combined an elephant, a moose, a maple tree and a golden shower tree which true story is Thailand's national tree?
 
Ed (00:00:52) - maybe we shouldn't go there right now. And I made Knuth an American who came to Thailand on a one year teaching contract 23 years ago, fell in love with the stunningly photogenic skies over Bangkok, which are apparently due to all the air pollution. So I never left.
 
Greg (00:01:09) - Like, oh, look over there, it's gray.
 
Ed (00:01:11) - The clouds. No, I mean the the cloud. Google, Google Cloud pictures Bangkok there's shocking there.
 
Ed (00:01:20) - Shockingly pictures. Cool pictures of Bangkok skies right. And I think.
 
Greg (00:01:25) - Is but.
 
Ed (00:01:25) - No I think I don't know about I don't know about us right now but I think it's due to air pollution. Like there's just crazy colors, you know? Trust me. Bangkok skies. Maybe Bangkok skies will work better, but there's great. I don't I don't know what to call it. Sky photography, cloud photography in Bangkok. For reals.
 
Greg (00:01:46) - At least it'll look, pretty while you're coughing up balls of phlegm onto the sidewalk.
 
Ed (00:01:50) - That's exactly right. That is. That's the. That's the right attitude. All right. We want to give a big thanks to all of our patrons who support the show. Patrons get every episode a day early, behind the scenes photos of our interviews, a heads up to send questions to upcoming guests, and access to our discord server to chat with me, Greg, and other listeners around the world. But best of all, patrons also get an unscripted, uncensored bonus episode every week where we riff on current events and Bangkok topics.
 
Ed (00:02:21) - On this week's bonus show, we chatted about Greg's upcoming trip to Singapore and a science experiment he'll carry out while he's down there. The recent expat orientation session held by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and our intense sadness and not being included as a useful resource for Thailand's newbies. And a discussion over a new patron who withdrew his support after things got a bit spicy on our discord chat. Which leads us to pondering if it's possible to broadly predict the political leanings of Thailand's expat population, to learn how to become a patron and get all this good stuff, plus full access to over 700 bonus and regular back episodes. Click the support button at the top of our website.
 
Greg (00:03:06) - That's right. And hey, a quick update. We didn't get a chance to mention it on the previous show last week, but last week's guest, Hugh Van Ness, has given us ten copies of Hell in Paradise, the book he wrote about his experiences looking for his friend in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami. So here's what we're going to do.
 
Greg (00:03:23) - The first ten people that hear this and send an email to Bangkok Podcast at gmail.com with the subject book will be the lucky winners of a copy of Hell and Paradise that we will send out to you. as for people who write in number 11 to infinity, well, stay tuned for the next giveaway. All right, well, on this episode, we welcome back our old friend, one of Asia's original travelers and travel writers, one Mr. Stuart McDonald from Travel Dawg. Now, last time Stu was on the show was way back in 2018 for episode 12 of season three, talking about, funnily enough, over tourism. Little did we know, however, that a year later, Thailand's tourism industry would be stopped dead in its tracks by Covid, giving the economy a purple purple that it is only now just recovering from. So we are happy that we were able to sit down with Stu again to check in on what's been going on tourism wise in Thailand, and the rest of Asia is a major part of the continent's economy.
 
Greg (00:04:18) - There's a lot riding on travellers coming back, but how much is too much? There was a lot said about Covid being an opportunity for the industry to come back to life in a responsible, sustainable way. But as you can imagine, your mileage may vary greatly on that idea depending on where you are. So here is part one of our discussion with our buddy Stu McDonald. I. Well. We are very happy to be talking to our old pal Stewart MacDonald, as David Letterman used to introduce Norm MacDonald. Welcome back to the Band podcast two.
 
Stu (00:04:53) - Thank you. Thanks for having me. The recorder is on.
 
Greg (00:04:57) - The recorder is on. Yeah.
 
Ed (00:04:58) - Now, it has been a while. So when when did we interview you last oh, three, three years? Well, pre-COVID.
 
Stu (00:05:07) - Like it's pre-COVID. So you got to add like another 30 years, you know, to cover it. I think it'd be like at least 4 or 5 years ago now. Yeah. I'm crazy. Yeah.
 
Greg (00:05:16) - When we were young kids.
 
Greg (00:05:18) - That's right. Well, for those that don't know, and I mentioned this very few of you out there that, Stu is the head honcho at Travel Fish, the undisputed champion of independent travel in Southeast Asia. Is that a good peg tagline?
 
Stu (00:05:28) - Oh, yeah. I'll pay you later. All right.
 
Greg (00:05:30) - Cool. Got a nickel? Nickel coming my way. But, Stu, you've been doing, really great stuff for a long, long time. You're really tied into the entire tourism industry. The market. some would say a voice of authority on all these things. So it's nice to have you back on the show. That is all about the most touristic city in the world that is not aimed at tourists. So welcome to that podcast. That's what we've the niche we've carved out for ourselves. Thank you. But tourism is a big, big part of, of of Bangkok and Thailand's economy. It's a massive driver of, of money, of culture, of, of why we love living here, of the energy of the place.
 
Greg (00:06:10) - and you put out a really interesting newsletter which everyone should subscribe to, and you link to an article recently that I thought was really interesting, and I want to read a paragraph from it that'll kick off this discussion about where tourism is in 2024 and where it's going. So if you'll indulge me just for a minute, let me read this quote. I thought it was very interesting. It said from the beginning, recreational travel has been this Janus faced straddling this dichotomy between profound and the profane, the enabling and the transgressive. But it is this dark shadow that is now ascendant amid a gathering sense that tourism's drawbacks are starting to outweigh its rewards. Inessential by definition. Responsible for 8% of global carbon emissions, tourism has become bound up with all manner of anxieties about human behavior and the damage we wreak on the world around us, in places that have been overwhelmed or remolded in ways its inhabitants regret. There is growing resistance. Taxes, prohibitions and no end of local antipathy are now as much an inconvenient feature of the holiday season as sunburn and gastroenteritis.
 
Greg (00:07:12) - And just finishing that off, it says here, is tourism's intractable contemporary paradox that the democratization of our geographical and cultural riches too often precipitates their ruination. Again and again, tourism sacrifices the objects of its gaze, then desecrating them with footprints. Pretty heavy stuff.
 
Ed (00:07:30) - Brutal.
 
Stu (00:07:31) - We should go on holiday, right?
 
Greg (00:07:34) - What's your take on that? Is. Is that accurate?
 
Stu (00:07:37) - I thought that was a really strong piece. every every week when I send the newsletter, I pick one. One particular story to say, if you're just going to read one thing, read this one. And the the author's his very solid rather. And, I thought it was. It was very good and very fair. and when he talks about the shadow of tourism, it's if for anybody who's been traveling for a prolonged period, over a prolonged period. So for five, ten, 15 years, something like that, returning to the same place as you see them change. And to a point they change with you like you start off as like a 19 year old backpacker.
 
Stu (00:08:20) - And when you're a 39 year old person with one and a half kids or something, you might be interested in different things. And and so to a point, places grow with you. but what I found was in the, in the lead up to the pandemic, say, from about 2016 onwards, I was still traveling a tremendous amount across the region, and I was finding that more and more places that I once loved. When I went back to them, I was like, I just never want to come here again. Really. And it was sort of became, yeah, it's quite depressing to sort of see how things change and, and and I'm not talking specifically about, Thailand here. I mean, it doesn't matter where you pick in the region. I mean, particularly in small islands where you see, that's the the whole cliche of concreting over Paradise. And Thailand has that down to a fine art.
 
Greg (00:09:19) - Reading of Paradise.
 
Ed (00:09:20) - Yeah.
 
Stu (00:09:21) - I mean, we're seeing it now in Bali as well as, like, quite literally the the rice fields are being paved over to make car parks.
 
Stu (00:09:31) - and so at some, at some point just, just looking at that from a tourist point of view, at some point you lose the reason why you're going there in the first place. Like if you're going somewhere to see rice paddies for example. And now when you go all there is as a car park, well, there's not much of a reason to go again, right? but. And what what the author is, I think touching on there. And this is something that is really getting a lot more discussion now, is that whole thing has really only been looked at through the tourist point of view. So it's sort of like when you say, I don't know, like Samui is now overdeveloped, a tourist won't want to go there like that kind of, discourse. but. What isn't getting talked about is a local people. Like this is people's homes. And so that's being transformed as well. And that is getting a lot more currency now like it happened through the pandemic. and particularly since then, which I think is a really good point.
 
Stu (00:10:36) - And so often tourism is looked at because the entire industry is not. I mean, it's about giving locals jobs and they make some money and everything. But really you're the the.
 
Ed (00:10:51) - Giving the customer. You're giving the customer what they want.
 
Stu (00:10:53) - Yeah. Give the customer a good time. You know, that's the focus. The customer is always right. and increasingly that is a bad deal for the people who live there. I mean yeah maybe you're getting a better job or something like that. Getting some more money. but the costs, whether it's through crime or drugs or traffic or pollution or. I mean, pick your poison, right? they're becoming like, you can't bury them anymore. so, yeah, I mean, there's really significant, challenges. And across the pandemic, when everything sort of shut down. some people, like myself included, were really hoping that the silver lining to this whole debacle was going to be a rethinking of tourism, to sort of say, well, how can we change what's going on here? So the customer is still getting their good time, whatever it is that they want.
 
Stu (00:11:56) - But the costs of that, because the residents where all the costs, are not so insurmountable that there's that we're doing a better balancing act. And in practice, that hasn't happened. Like the industry is trying to get back to 2019 as quickly as.
 
Ed (00:12:13) - Possible, trying to get back to the numbers. To the numbers.
 
Stu (00:12:15) - I mean, it's completely insane. I mean, Thailand, came out there was a story late last year about all the new airports they want to build. It's the same thing in Vietnam.
 
Ed (00:12:28) - And it's just.
 
Stu (00:12:29) - The.
 
Greg (00:12:30) - Census is unsustainable.
 
Stu (00:12:31) - Fixation on ever growing numbers. I first came to Thailand. And when was it? 90, 93. And so what are we now like? Is that 40.
 
Ed (00:12:41) - Years? Yeah. 40 years.
 
Stu (00:12:43) - Jesus. Jesus, where did that go?
 
Ed (00:12:48) - What? I'm sorry. That's 38. 93. Did you say 93? 93? Okay. 30 years, 30 years. Not so bad.
 
Stu (00:12:54) - So let's just age the decade. but the thing is that Thailand still has the exact same number of islands in 2023 as it had in 1993.
 
Stu (00:13:05) - And yet the tourism I mean what are they aiming for now like 30 million or some ludicrous 4040.
 
Ed (00:13:11) - But they're aiming at.
 
Stu (00:13:12) - we're gonna put the people, you know,
 
Greg (00:13:16) - The example that comes to mind me was for me immediately is a story I read recently about Venice, which is just overwhelmed with tourists to the point now where they're like, violence is almost breaking out, like the locals who live there, who are left, which is like 10% of the annual the number of people that are living in the city by any, any day. You know, they're protesting and they're trying to put all these extremely restrictive laws in place. Just they've had enough. They've they've done it. It's just the whole city's just getting ruined and.
 
Ed (00:13:46) - Sort of have a question for you. and just because I try to relate where you're saying to my experience, I've never been crazy about the classic tourist spots, like, I just never been that into it. You know, I'm kind of a you've seen one temple, you've seen them all kind of guy.
 
Ed (00:13:59) - That's just my thing. But one thing that bugs me and it it I think what you're saying is in line with this is as these tourist destinations grow to me, they become homogenous. Yeah. It's like it does. Like I could go to a place in Vietnam with a lot of tourists and it'll have like a pizza shop, this thing, and it looks exactly like a beach in Phuket. And it's like it's like a generic now it's a generic tourist destination and it's it's lost whatever local identity it had. Yeah. Does that make sense?
 
Stu (00:14:28) - Yeah, absolutely.
 
Ed (00:14:29) - We try to talk straight about Thailand. And to me this is something I've never liked about Thailand is that I feel like sometimes I go to a small Thai town and I feel like it's exactly like the last one. It's like they have the same plastic stools in the same restaurants.
 
Greg (00:14:43) - You know, a Honda dealership next to the 7-Eleven.
 
Ed (00:14:45) - But it's especially true of tourist places. It's like they're almost identical.
 
Stu (00:14:49) - Yeah, yeah. And interchangeable.
 
Stu (00:14:51) - And I think on one hand that is you again, you're giving the consumer what they want. Right. So the tourist wants an Irish pub on Samui. That's right. Or whatever, you know, like. That's right. You know, that's an easy flogging horse. but you end up with an Irish pub on every Thai island and the tailor shops and all the other tourist tourism window dressing.
 
Ed (00:15:17) - Shop with it.
 
Stu (00:15:18) - Sure. And, I mean, I don't want to be the you should have been here yesterday kind of guy, but in the, in the early 90s, if you went to say, Cosmo, they had a certain vibe. And then if you went over to the northern Andaman Islands like Lanta Koya or something like that, they were still Thai islands, but there was a different vibe to them. You went down to the southern Andaman like lip and dang, whatever. How they were different again now is not so much. I mean, there's still like, oh, this is a muslim island.
 
Stu (00:15:53) - So there's still like a different kind of vibe to a point. But tourism infrastructure wise, it's all the same. It's all there. Same with the accommodation, you know, it's going to be a real problem because for a lot of punters, like just a typical holidaymaker, they want a hammock, a palm tree, a beer and some sand and some water, you know, like, right. Sounds simplifying, you know, not speaking for myself, I'm much more sophisticated. Of course. Yes it is. but the problem is, is when the destinations all end up the same, then you're going to, from the tourist point of view, it's like, oh, well, I can't go to Bali because they've got whatever, some structural problem or whatever. So I'm going to go to Boracay or I'm going to go to Samui, or I'm going to go to the bucket. There's geographical differences, there are cultural differences, there's food differences. But at the heart of the tourist product. That's right.
 
Stu (00:16:52) - They're not that different. Not that different. Right. And I think it's a very unfortunate way that, that, destinations have developed. They haven't sort of. It. To say they should resist is the wrong word, and they certainly have pride in how they live and their traditional way of life. But there is this mentality about pleasing the tourists, about giving the tourists what they want. And so that's what you end up having.
 
Ed (00:17:22) - Do you think the Tourism Authority of Thailand is aware of this problem? Do you think they sit around thinking like, how do we differentiate Pokot from smoothie from gobchang? Because that seems like that's what you should do. You should make bucket uniquely bucket. So. So if you've been to smoothie and you want something different you know, oh I haven't got the puke head experience. But now the problem is they're very similar.
 
Stu (00:17:46) - I mean, the tit comes up with all kinds of ideas. You know, they have like.
 
Ed (00:17:50) - It's like the one part of the Thai government that has a real budget.
 
Greg (00:17:54) - They spend it on a new app every year. That's going to be the next.
 
Stu (00:17:56) - How many how many goddamned Thailand tourism websites are there? Yeah. Jesus. but Thailand promotes itself. It doesn't to a point. It doesn't need a tourism board because it's such an easy country to travel in. I mean, other countries like the, I think of, of the region, Vietnam has probably had the most interesting longer thought out tourism ideas. Oh, really? but then I think that died in the ass as well. So. Yeah. No, I think it's it would be a good idea for, destinations to differentiate themselves better, but.
 
Speaker 5 (00:18:40) - It's a difficult.
 
Stu (00:18:41) - Thing to sort of put back into the box. You know, like if you think about bucket, for example, like what's its real strengths? Food obviously is the food is the big one. But you'll go down in in the tourist areas, there's no real Thai food there. You know, you have to go in to book at town or whatever to go.
 
Stu (00:19:00) - And I mean, you will find real Thai food, but the focus is all on Joe's Swedish meatball place. All.
 
Ed (00:19:09) - Also, I remember our buddy Dan, was down in Phuket. Actually, do you remember when the the Puckett sandbox. Open sandbox? Yeah. The puked sandbox opened and I rushed down there, like, thinking that, like, tourists were going to swarm back and no one was there. Except. Except Dan was down there doing it for the tat. And, Puckett actually really has the potential to be unique because it's got, you know, it's like got a Portuguese influence and it's got there's also a, a Chinese immigrant population that settled there like, yeah, 102 years, 100 years ago. So they actually it's not quite the same. But from talking to Dan, it's almost like New Orleans in the US where New Orleans is, is French. And like, oh, that's interesting. You know, like Phuket has the potential to be unique.
 
Stu (00:19:58) - Yeah it does. It has that potential.
 
Stu (00:20:01) - I think in in all of these countries the potential is, is huge. And what is I one of the more frustrating things about it is over and over and over again that potential is, is right chucked out the window going.
 
Greg (00:20:18) - Going back to what you said about the optimism you had in the early days of the pandemic, about how this sort of will reset, recalibrate the focus of tourism when things start to come back. And I was cautiously optimistic, but also really not really because. Right. You know, and to quote the amazing Cyndi Lauper, money changes everything, right. Like it's just you cannot get away from that. Eventually the magnet is the needle and the compass is going to swing back to money. And it's I can understand why it's so hard for them to say like, no, no, we're you used to get 5000 tourists a day. We're going to cap it at 2000 and get way less money, but we're going to improve the environment. I like in.
 
Ed (00:20:59) - Partial defense of the Thai government.
 
Ed (00:21:01) - They want, you know, a lot of small business people suffer during the pandemic. And so when they want to bring tourists back, this is I'm sure that's what Thai people are clamoring for, especially at that situation. It's pretty hard then to either institute controls or try to regulate it more when people have been desperate for the last few years.
 
Stu (00:21:20) - Yeah, I agree with you to a point, but I think that it's a mistake to think of tourism as a Band-Aid on governments idiotic development plans. Right? Right, right. So say to use Indonesia as an example in Bali. there the there hasn't been, a huge investment in education and skilling and that kind of things into any fields other than tourism. Oh, so they need the tourism to get people off the land to get better paying jobs and that kind of thing. But at the end of the day, if you're an unskilled person working in the hotel, making beds in you're 25, you're going to be doing it when you're 55. And that's not necessarily a great thing when you weigh up all the other costs of what's going in there, development wise.
 
Stu (00:22:17) - So yeah, like tourism as a, as a whole is that I think the biggest employer on earth. Oh, really?
 
Ed (00:22:25) - Yeah. Oh, the biggest single type of the biggest.
 
Stu (00:22:28) - By industry or trade or whatever you, whatever you want to call it. so there is a huge amount of jobs, but a lot of them are really crappy jobs. And we saw this in Bali at the start of the pandemic, when I mean to their credit, some hotels and other tourism businesses bent over backwards to look after the their employees to try and, ease the shock and everything where others were like, don't come in tomorrow, right. You know, and like these are like Bali for an Indonesian person is an expensive place to live. So a lot of people had to go back to Sulawesi or Java or Lombok or whatever. And now, shock and horror, the tourism industry is having trouble getting employees back. And it's like, well, maybe if you hadn't treated them as garbage at the start of the pandemic, you won't be dealing with this.
 
Ed (00:23:17) - You know, I didn't know this, but this reminds me of in, in, like global macroeconomics, sometimes economists talk about the, the resource curse, and they talk about how oil, like, ruins a lot of economies because the governments just get addicted to oil and they never develop a proper economy. Like, you know, if you look at Saudi Arabia, they have they have oil and that's it. So in a way, you're saying tourism is like that. You can get addicted to the tourism, and then the rest of your economy never develops properly.
 
Stu (00:23:46) - Because tourism creates a lot of semi-skilled jobs, okay? Whether it's working in a hotel or as a driver or whatever, you know, you don't need to be a brain surgeon to work in a hotel. so for destinations that, don't have a lot of alternative jobs to offer, tourism is an easy fix. But the issue is, are these decent jobs? Are they coming with benefits? Is there security in there? Like that kind of thing needs to be considered.
 
Stu (00:24:19) - So like Greg was talking earlier about, the overall tourism numbers, you know, whatever the tat's aiming for now for the million or whatever, the best thing that they could do would be to come out and say, our target for 2025 is 12 million, right? And just cut it. And that's going to be some really hard times for a lot of businesses. but in taking that and then having a new baseline and working from there on a much more gradual plane, it means that these destinations are still going to be worth going to for, like my kids or my kids kids. But the way everything like places like Hawaiian or Luang Prabang or Chiang Mai, even, the way that they were developing pre-pandemic, you consider that growth for another ten years at that rate. I mean, you you still want to go there? No, no. You know.
 
Speaker 6 (00:25:18) - God, that'd be.
 
Greg (00:25:18) - Amazing. Can you you know how, like, exclusivity makes something much more desirable, right? Can you imagine if Thailand said, we've got 25 million tickets to come into the country? Yeah.
 
Greg (00:25:27) - Like, oh my God, you'd have. I mean.
 
Ed (00:25:29) - Very few countries do that. I mean, I know Bhutan is famous, but that's extreme, right?
 
Greg (00:25:34) - But but Bhutan is now like an aspirational destination for a lot of people, right? Yeah.
 
Ed (00:25:38) - I feel like a talent could never do something like that. Realistically. Interesting. Well, they could.
 
Greg (00:25:43) - Interesting thought experiment.
 
Stu (00:25:44) - This is this is the thing. It's all of this kind of stuff is driven by what's happening in two years time, you know, and particularly with climate change and what's going to happen in Thailand. they need to be thinking about the post Tourism Thailand in the south. So they've looked at the, beach loss in Thailand. That's going to happen over the next 80 years from rising sea levels. So in 80 years on the Andaman coast, they're looking at about 75%, 75% sand loss. Wow. Right. So would you go to Santa if there was no beaches?
 
Ed (00:26:22) - Right. Right.
 
Stu (00:26:23) - Of course you know. Yeah.
 
Stu (00:26:25) - so it's some like people are like, oh, well, that's 80 years away. Who gives a shit? You know, who's going to be around, but it's not going to be totally normal for 79 years and then change. Sure. You know, so even in 20 years we're going to be seeing serious changes. So you need destinations need to be thinking about this. They need to be talking about it. And Thailand in particular isn't.
 
Ed (00:26:49) - I wonder if I think we did talk about this before, but, you know, everyone talked about during Covid how gap kind of the coral reef like rebuilt itself and did and the Thai government seem to be very aware that having no tourists was good for the environment. Like, you know, I saw many stories about this, but do you think like, did they learn anything from that? It seems like you could, you know, one thing that could work like, you know, since we're trying to be optimistic here is maybe they could, you know, pick an island that they close for a year.
 
Ed (00:27:23) - You know, it's like they announced like, okay in, you know, 2026.
 
Greg (00:27:27) - They rotate it. Yeah.
 
Ed (00:27:29) - You know, I mean that seems not crazy, right? Right. Oh wow.
 
Greg (00:27:33) - This is a big ideas.
 
Ed (00:27:34) - But I mean, because it was very good for people to be closed.
 
Stu (00:27:38) - Yeah. I mean I went to, to copy immediately after the tsunami, there was like six days or something after it. And it was it was horrific. but the silver lining of that was that. Okay. Well, in the way you've got the blank slate, you know. Yeah. I mean, it's tragic, but there's an opportunity here because like before the tsunami, BP was a disaster area, to rebuild and do things differently. You know, it was like a really once in a lifetime opportunity, right? A reset. You look at the joint now, you know. Oh, really? It's a freaking disaster. Oh, really? back to.
 
Greg (00:28:17) - Where it was before.
 
Stu (00:28:18) - This is Dawn, you know, not not, DiCaprio's beach, but, I've been coming to that on the, what do they call it? Maya beach.
 
Stu (00:28:29) - that's been a really interesting one to watch because you have these two. Parties that want completely opposite things. So you want your boat drivers and that kind of stuff, who are then making the money, ferrying all the tourists. They want to take as many people as possible. That's how they make a living. Fair enough. But then the people who want to protect the environment and that kind of thing, I say, okay, we've got to have a capital. So there is a middle ground. And they they've been like trying to figure it out. But every time they came out with a number and it was like, well, how are you actually going to manage that. Yeah. Right. You know.
 
Ed (00:29:08) - are there any caps now do you know if there's any caps?
 
Stu (00:29:10) - I'm not sure what the situation is.
 
Greg (00:29:11) - The story kind of went away, didn't it? I heard anything about it.
 
Stu (00:29:14) - I saw a photo a couple of weeks ago of like, a bazillion people on the beach again. Oh, really? Oh, really? Yeah.
 
Stu (00:29:21) - but I think that.
 
Speaker 5 (00:29:23) - Yeah, it's.
 
Stu (00:29:24) - A I'm not one to sort of say destination should be priced out, like, say, the Bhutan approach. I don't agree with, but I totally agree with ticketing. So if some dude who's really into the national environment and natural environment here goes to play and says, okay, a sustainable number of people is wherever, let's say 100 people a day, just for argument's sake, that's this place cannot take more than that many people. So that's fine. That's what we do. There's 100 tickets a day there, like ten bar each or whatever.
 
Speaker 5 (00:29:59) - And so if.
 
Stu (00:30:00) - You want to go, you're going to have to book that six months in advance. Oh, I see.
 
Ed (00:30:04) - You're saying don't use market pricing. So because, you know, if they reduce the number then the price will go away. So you're saying set the price. Set the number.
 
Stu (00:30:11) - Price just like a nominal charge. Because the real benefit in the ticketing isn't the revenue. It's protecting the place for future generations.
 
Stu (00:30:21) - So they need to think about it that way. People book their flights a year in advance. They booked their hotels a year in advance. Why can't they do this? And they totally could. It would be like a again, a very big adjustment adjustment for businesses and that kind of thing. But if you want to have something that your kids are going to be able to benefit from, you need to think a bit further in in advance.
 
Speaker 6 (00:30:45) - Yeah. You know.
 
Greg (00:30:46) - I sometimes cynically say that tie bureaucrats and the people in charge would rather make 500 bought once than 100 bought ten times.
 
Ed (00:30:53) - You know, so I mean, very nearsighted.
 
Stu (00:30:55) - It's a common sentiment. I mean, I was in the Philippines late last year on a dive trip, and, there's a particular place there that is fabulous for, diving with, sardines. Like you're in the school of about 8 million fish. It's incredible. But I was. But the place is a mess. It's a complete disaster area.
 
Speaker 7 (00:31:16) - And so I was talking.
 
Stu (00:31:17) - Interviewing a dive master there, a European guy. And I'm like, well, what do you think about this? This is a mess, you know? And he's like, he said, in 40 years there's a lobby gone. So we make our money now. You know. Right.
 
Ed (00:31:31) - But he's just he's making it gone. Yeah.
 
Stu (00:31:33) - And I mean, fish rots from the head, you know, and but I think that isn't that uncommon. an outlook. And for the these islands in the South that are going to lose their beaches, is should they maybe just make as much money as they can now? Because in a decade's time, they won't have a business anymore?
 
Greg (00:31:58) - Speaking of that, I want to talk a little bit about sustainable tourism and anyone who follows you on threads or your newsletters, you've, you've sort of pivoted to that over the past year or a couple of years and made that a real focus of, of the stuff you're trying to promote and investigate and write about what's what's going on there.
 
Greg (00:32:15) - Is that sort of like the new thing or people really taking that into account now?
 
Stu (00:32:19) - It's sort of, I was talking to someone recently about it and, they said like, how were you traveling when you were 20 something? And I'm like, I don't give a shit. You know? I didn't know anything about sustainability. I didn't know anything about carbon or flying too much or whatever. I had no idea. so I'm a very late comer to the game. I was turned on to it through, the pandemic and seeing the effect in Bali of what happened when everybody lost their livelihoods and there was no, no security blanket, no safety net. and just I went back to school, started my masters. And the more I read about it, the more I learned about it. The more people I talk to, the more I realize this is really, really important. If we want to have destinations that are still worth going to in 20, 30, 40, 50 years time. And so there's lots of different angles to it.
 
Stu (00:33:16) - But the core of sustainability is that has three foundations, which are the environment, the economy and society. So every, bit of tourism, you sort of need to weigh up the pros and cons across those three things. So I sort of came away from thinking about this and and the way I look at it is, you know, have this cliche they'll have like a photo of an untouched beach and some, some footprints and it says like, leave only footprints or something like that. Thinking about that cliche, and the way I think about it is that it doesn't matter how you travel, it doesn't matter what kind of travel you're doing every step of that journey. You can take it in a way that has a more positive effect and less negatives everything. And so it becomes a case of like analyzing your travel behaviors. And so saying, well, what do I do? You know, do I eat at imported restaurants and imported food and wine? Do I fly all the time? Do I stay in luxury hotels like all of these different things? And I'm not saying that we all should, like, step back and just walk everywhere and stay in a cave, you know? But again, there's like a middle, middle.
 
Speaker 6 (00:34:32) - Ground, right? Right.
 
Speaker UU (00:34:38) - Hi. My name. Man.
 
Ed (00:34:42) - Man, it was great seeing him, post-Covid. First time I've seen him in a couple of years, and, things have changed, you know. Like, your intro said it like we were. We were talking about overtourism, and then bam, all of a sudden tourism went to basically zero.
 
Greg (00:34:57) - Right. Yeah. It was crazy. We had no idea what was coming. Did we were all we were all young and optimistic back then in 2018.
 
Ed (00:35:03) - That is right. That is right. and a lot has happened. So, you know, we made it through Covid and then now we're roughly real roughly about two years out and, things are recovering. And it was just great to get a, a professional person to take instead of just relying on my random musings.
 
Greg (00:35:23) - Yeah. It was interesting to hear his insights. Always good stuff. I.
 
Ed (00:35:27) - Was just checking the tourism numbers for 2024, and they're pretty damn good. so I just found an article that came out April 2nd, and it says in the first three months, Thailand has received over 9.37 million foreign tourists, which is a 44% increase from 2023.
 
Ed (00:35:50) - That's insane.
 
Greg (00:35:51) - 40% already from all of 2023.
 
Ed (00:35:55) - No, 40% more than the first quarter last year. Yeah, yeah. which is a pretty huge increase, year on year.
 
Greg (00:36:03) - Yeah. That is that is pretty huge. That's good. But you know, like I mentioned during the interview as well, like, I, I really think it's it's so hard to do, it's so hard to do with any business because I understand you want to make money and you, but you know, like restricting access to a lot of these things, selling like limited amounts of tickets to attractions and things like that. I think that would I think that would go a long way to that. That would be soft power, you know, that would just increase the desirability of a lot of these places if only X tickets were available. And sorry, you can't do it. You got to come back next week or whatever.
 
Ed (00:36:32) - Well, I mean, I think you're right, just like, you know, we talked about it in the interview, that, you know, the overall number of tourists, it's such an easy number to use.
 
Ed (00:36:42) - But there are just downsides to just focusing on growth, growth, growth as we talked about.
 
Greg (00:36:47) - Yeah, it's a it's a bit sad to just see the growth at all costs thing because we know what comes with it. We know what comes with overdevelopment and environmental degradation. And you know, hotels that are poorly designed and quickly built and don't take into account, you know, quality. It's just about getting as many people through as quickly as possible, which is a bit of a bummer. But, man, I just I just quickly looked up the the tourism numbers going back. Well, this site has them going back to 1995 and 1995. They were about 7 million.
 
Ed (00:37:17) - Interesting. And this year and this year is projecting 35.
 
Greg (00:37:23) - 35 from 7 to 35 million men. It must have been a very different landscape back then.
 
Ed (00:37:28) - Man, I wish I went back then. I mean, you and I have had plenty of long time ex-pats, and their stories about the 90s and even the 80s are are crazy.
 
Ed (00:37:37) - Yeah.
 
Greg (00:37:37) - No doubt. I was just out of high school. It would have been a different world, man. but yeah, thanks to you for coming on. Always. Always a pleasure to chat to you and see what's going on around Asia. You're a good voice to talk to you about that. And anyone, if you don't know, travel fish head over there right now. Sign up for the newsletter. Really good stuff comes out every week, and we'll be back next week to talk to Stu for part two for sure. Thanks to all right, let's do something we call would you rather one of us picks two contrasting situations tied to Thailand to debate and choose which one we'd prefer. Ed, this week I got something for you. Alrighty, now, this one's going to require a bit of a hypothetical on your part. You're going to have to imagine something for me. I want you to imagine.
 
Ed (00:38:17) - That I'm good at imagining stuff. You are good.
 
Greg (00:38:19) - At imagining something. I want you to imagine that you are a tour guide.
 
Greg (00:38:23) - Your professional tour guide.
 
Ed (00:38:25) - Okay.
 
Greg (00:38:26) - You love showing people around. Now, I did some googling around here about Cleveland. Oh, and, it said here that probably the most popular tourist attraction in Cleveland is the Cleveland Museum of Art.
 
Ed (00:38:38) - Interesting. Oh, I have another theory of what it would have been, but let me. Why don't you. Why don't you, continue.
 
Greg (00:38:45) - Okay. Well, I was going to say if you had to be a tour guide for a year, would you rather be a tour guide at the Cleveland Museum of Art or the Grand Palace?
 
Ed (00:38:55) - Ooh, yeah. This is a weird question. it is a weird question. Let me make my point. I would have I would have thought that Cleveland's number one tourist attraction was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But maybe it's not. Maybe. Maybe it is the Cleveland Museum of Art that that's possible. We have a good museum of art back home, along with a good orchestra and a really good, hospital, by the way.
 
Ed (00:39:16) - So I don't know why, I don't know, I'm going on a documentary.
 
Greg (00:39:19) - Tours go to hospitals.
 
Ed (00:39:20) - I'm going. I'm going on a Cleveland like marketing rant. right, right. But, Wow. So it's funny because, I, I museums are things that I don't go to enough, and I, and I kind of regret it because when I go, I usually appreciate it. But I've said I've said on the podcast before that I'm just not a big temple guy or I'm kind of the the type of person who would go to a temple once, or I'd find the most photogenic temple and go there, you know, once and take a bunch of pictures. And then I feel like I don't need to go to temples anymore, you know? So in this case, I would, because normally I think I would, I would much rather be a tour guide in Thailand than in Cleveland, Ohio. Like, I just. Yeah.
 
Greg (00:40:09) - Well, that's the thing, right? Like it's it's much more interesting.
 
Greg (00:40:12) - Right.
 
Ed (00:40:12) - But the way you framed it, the way you framed it as, like a museum in Cleveland versus the Grand Palace and the Grand Palace is cool, but I'm just not. I'm really not a temple guy. And like, the Cleveland Museum of Art is awesome. You know, like, it's legit, you know, world class museum. I don't know if it's that. I mean, our orchestra is in the top ten. The Cleveland Clinic is probably the second best hospital. So the Museum of Art is up there. I, you know, it might sound weird, but, I'm just really not a temple guy. I'm going to. I'm going to. I'm going to go Cleveland Museum of Art. All right, fair enough, fair enough. So I'm kind of I feel guilty that I don't go to museums more, but I don't feel guilty when I skip a temple.
 
Greg (00:40:59) - That could come back to haunt you when you're burning in hell.
 
Ed (00:41:01) - That's right. Correct. Absolutely correct.
 
Greg (00:41:04) - All right, well, Cleveland, me, if you're going to Cleveland, just email Ed for some tips on the museum.
 
Greg (00:41:08) - You'll send those like.
 
Ed (00:41:09) - Yeah, well, rock and roll we got, we got the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and that's. I didn't want.
 
Greg (00:41:13) - To choose a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because obviously, who wouldn't love to do that more than the Grand Palace? No offense to the Grand Palace, but come on.
 
Ed (00:41:18) - Right. Yeah, that would have been too easy. Yeah.
 
Greg (00:41:22) - But you're going to be looking at paintings for an entire year ago and and this painting was done. And. Anyway, you're a tour guide to the museum. Have fun with that. Good. All righty.
 
Ed (00:41:32) - All right. A final thanks to our patrons who support the show. Patrons get a ton of cool perks and the warm, fuzzy feeling knowing that they're helping and are never ending. Quest for cool content? Find out more by clicking support on our website and connect with us online. Where Bangkok podcast on social media Bangkok podcast.com on the web or simply Bangkok Podcast at gmail.com. We love hearing from our listeners and our reply to our messages.
 
Greg (00:41:58) - That's right. You can also listen to each episode on YouTube. You can send us a voicemail through our website that will feature on the show. Hit me up on threads of VK. Greg. Thank you for listening. Everyone. Take it easy out there. Stay cool and we will see you back here next.
 
Speaker UU (00:42:10) - Week, no doubt.