In the five days following last week?s bombings in Bangkok, travel bookings to Thailand have suffered a fall of 65 percent compared to the same period last year.
In the week prior to the bombings, bookings had been running 20 percent ahead, according to analysis by ForwardKeys, which analyses over 14 million travel booking transactions a day retrieved from the major global reservation systems worldwide.
The source markets which were most affected were all Asian, with Hong Kong 216 percent down, China 110 percent down, Taiwan 105 percent down, Japan 95 percent down and Singapore 88 percent down. (For clarification, a figure of 100 percent down indicates that no net bookings were made and above 100 percent, bookings that had previously been made were cancelled.)
Asia as a whole was 93 percent down and Thailand?s most important origin market, Europe, which accounts for 59 percent of travel to the country, was 30 percent down.
When it comes to the type of travel affected, group travel generally has suffered more than individual travel, with net cancellations of group visits occurring from China, Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan.
However business travel from China has been exceptionally badly impacted, with a 353 percent drop, which means that in the five days after the bombings, 253 percent more businesspeople from China cancelled their travel to Thailand than booked during the same period last year.
Looking ahead over the next six months, bookings to Thailand before the bombings had been substantially up on the previous year ? around 50 percent up from China, Japan and Singapore. Whilst the bombings have caused a set-back, they are still running ahead, with China, Japan and Singapore all more than 30 percent ahead.
Olivier Jager, CEO of ForwardKeys commented: ?Whilst the bombings have been profoundly shocking and have had an immediately detrimental impact on travel to Thailand, there are actually some significant positives for the destination.
?First, the outlook for the coming six months is still significantly ahead of where it was at the same time last year.
?Second, the impact on tourism has not been worse ? for example, in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Tunisia, inbound travel was much more badly affected.
?Third, it also appears that bookings from China for the first week of October, which is known as Golden Week owing to the large out-flux of Chinese, have held up well.
?As a consequence, I expect Thailand will maintain its extraordinary ability to rebound from set-backs.?
Meanwhile, Thailand?s military government has been at pains to play down any suggestion visitors might be put off from visiting.
?The number of tourists in prominent tourist attractions both in Bangkok and other provinces is still high,? Colonel Winthai Suvaree, a spokesman for the junta, said yesterday in a daily broadcast, without giving any numbers.
?The Ministry of Tourism and Sports has further reported that the statistics of foreign tourists travelling into Thailand is at the normal level.?