7 Feb, 2025
Thailand arrivals growth slows in Jan 2025 as competitors surge
Bangkok — Declines in arrivals from 24 source-markets in January 2025, including countries such as Malaysia, India, Singapore, Japan, USA and UK, slowed what was otherwise turning out to be a strong five-month surge in tourism to Thailand since September 2024.
The total arrivals of 3,709,102 in January 2025 were a fractional 2.25% growth over arrivals of 3,627,441 in December 2024 and the same as 3,718,504 in pre-Covid January 2019. The slowdown was offset by growth in arrivals from China, Russia, Vietnam, Taiwan and Israel.
The official figures being reported daily compare arrivals in January 2025 over January 2024 (3,035,296). That shows a significant growth of 18.01%. But a comparison between December 2024 to January 2025 shows a different picture.
December is usually always a good month for Thailand due to the high-season marketing campaigns to attract visitors for the year-end festive season activities. That certainly happened in December 2024.
However, the declines in many of the traditionally strong performing markets in January 2025 is a cause for concern.
Thailand’s visitor arrivals of 35,545,714 in 2024 were well below the pre-Covid 2019 levels of 39,916,251. The target for 2025, declared the “Amazing Thailand Grand Tourism and Sports Year,” is to hit the 2019 levels. That will require urgent action to address the slower growth caused by the declines in January 2025.
Visitor travel trends worldwide are being impacted by many factors, such as growing competition, increasing geopolitical volatility and insecurity, currency fluctuations, natural disasters, costs and economic conditions. Other more specific reasons related to Thailand include the negative publicity impacting safety and security of Chinese visitors, the PM2.5 factor, and the potential impact of the new online evisa requirement.
Going forward, competition from new, emerging destinations with equally good, products, services and attractions and fewer tourists is likely to be a significant threat.
Vietnam is one example. In December 2024, Vietnam recorded 1.74 million arrivals. Although that was way below the arrivals to Thailand that same month, arrivals in January 2025 grew 18.5% to 2.07 million. Vietnam’s total arrivals of 17.58 million in 2024 were also up 39.5% over 2023, much higher than the Thai arrivals growth rate.
Another up and coming competitor is Sri Lanka. Its total arrivals of 2.05 million in 2024 were up 38.07% over 2023. Its fastest growing source-markets are India, Russia, UK, Germany, China, Australia and USA, nearly the same as Thailand’s.
Here are two key charts showing the plus-minus trends to Thailand from the key markets. Some danger zones are the declines in arrivals from most of the neighbouring ASEAN countries, Japan, India, Australia, the UAE and a number of European countries.
The Ministry of Tourism and Sports says they are “preliminary figures”. According to the Immigration Department, “The accumulated data in the system is approximately 1-3 percent different from the accumulated data of the Ministry of Tourism and Sports due to monthly data cleansing and does not include tourists who enter Thailand using Border Pass.”
However, the figures have only a small differential margin, especially in tracking the arrivals by air.
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