Thailand's welcoming doors for tourists open slowly

With Thailand welcoming back foreign tourists to select destinations, Ulas Mehmet Isci is cautiously optimistic that his tourism business will finally recover after it came to a standstill from early last year as the pandemic broke out.

"We really hope that tourism is going to come back in the (next) five to six months, or perhaps over the coming year," said Isci, chief executive officer of Tropics Travel, which operates travel agencies throughout Thailand, including Koh Samui Tours, Chiang Mai Tours, Phuket Tours and Krabi Tours.

"I see a sign of recovery, but the recovery may come… a little slowly," Isci said. His business, in which tourist numbers dropped to zero at times over the past year, has recovered by only about 3 to 5 percent after Thailand began its reopening programs this month.

Following a program that began allowing vaccinated foreign tourists into the resort island of Phuket from July 1, Thailand launched a similar scheme called Samui Plus on Thursday to enable travel to Koh Samui, the country's second-largest island after Phuket, via direct international flights or sealed routes from Bangkok.

Unlike the program that allows quarantine-free travel, an expansion to it requires tourists to stay at an approved hotel in Koh Samui for a week and stay within their accommodation for the first three days, the Tourism Authority of Thailand said.

Tourists with negative COVID-19 test results will be allowed to travel to the neighboring islands of Koh Tao and Koh Phangan after their first week on Samui.

Minister of Tourism and Sports Phiphat Ratchakitprakarn said the reopening of the three islands is another significant step toward achieving the goal set by Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha last month to reopen the whole country within 120 days, or by the end of October.

The tourism authority expects as many as 1,000 tourists to arrive in the first month and generate at least 100 million baht ($3 million) for the local economy.

The opening up of more islands comes even as Thailand experiences a rising number of COVID-19 infections.

Mainly driven by the highly contagious Delta variant, the country recorded more than 8,000 daily cases in the nine days to Saturday.

Significant risk

"There is a significant risk in the Thai approach to reopening, given cases are not just increasing across the country but increasing aggressively," said Jeremy Lim, associate professor and director of global health of the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health in the National University of Singapore.

Thailand has yet to achieve the necessary levels of vaccination, a key to successful reopening, Lim said. The country had administered about 14.2 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines by Sunday. It started the campaign in February. To realize its reopening plan, Thailand needs to have a threshold of 50 million people given first shots by early October.

Bill Barnett, managing director of the hospitality consultancy C9 Hotelworks in Thailand, said he is still "cautiously positive" about Thailand's reopening, given that only 10 people tested positive among about 5,473 travelers arriving in Phuket in the first two weeks.