Tourist Arrivals to Thailand by Nationality

Data for 2022, restart of Tourism Economy

For all practical purposes, the tourism economy in Thailand restarted in 2022, with the number of visitors increasing markedly each quarter of the year. At the end of the year a total of 11,153,026 tourists had visited, which was a most welcome result, and greatly anticipated. A total of 39,797,406 tourists had visited in 2019, so the number of 2022 was 'just' 28% of that. In any case, the number of arrivals towards the end of the year, was very promising for 2023. We give a short review of the arrivals in 2022, below you will find data also from 2019.

The image above compares arrivals from different world regions in 2019 (blue) and 2022 (orange). Mostly the number of arrivals was proportionally less for all regions. Except for arrivals from Eastern Asia. Only few Chinese visitors arrived, actually stringent Covid-19 restrictions were just lifted towards the end of 2022. Only arrivals from Japan and Taiwan were limited. We expect better numbers for 2023, since in January 2023 Chinese travelers already started arriving.

Most visitors came from countries as listed above. Chinese visitors numbered just 274,000 while more than 10 million arrived in 2019. The biggest provider of mostly short-term visitors was Malaysia, which makes sense, since it is a neighboring country. Chinese visitors made up just 2.5 % of total visitors, while in 2019 they made up 27.6% of total visitors. One striking trend, and also visible in the streets of Bangkok, are the increasing number of visitors from India. In 2022 they made up 8.9 % of total visitors, compared to 5.0 % of total visitors in 2019. So maybe in a few years Thailand will receive prominent numbers both from India and China (visitors to Indo-China !).

Tourism Statistics :

The number of tourist arrivals in Thailand, with some hiccups, has steadily increased over the last two decades. As recent as 2010 there were only 15.94 million visitors to the country. By 2015 this had increased substantially (almost doubled) to 29.92 million visitors. Now in 2019 the number thas increased to 39.8 million visitors. It was a modest increase by 4.24 % from the previous year. For the future, we have to observe the effect of the corona virus infection, but 2020 is projected to become a difficult year for Thai tourism.

Over the past decade, Thai tourism numbers have increased mainly because of the increase of Chinese and other Asian visitors.As seen in the graph below, most visitors come from East Asia (with China providing the bulk) and the ASEAN countries. Europe has been providing a rather steady number of visitors, while the other continents have more limited number of visitors (though the Indian subcontinent looks promising the last few years).

From 2012 onwards, China has been taking the top spot as far as providing tourists to Thailand, now way ahead of Malaysia in second place. As seen below, close to 11 million Chinese visitors arrived in 2019, which was 27.6 % of the total. Chinese visitors stopped coming in 2020 and 2021, and in 2022 we are still waiting for them.

Japan, South Korea, and India provide close to 2 million visitors to Thailand each year. Among the European countries, Russia in the last decade has become most important, with in 2019 close to 1.5 million visitors. You will note that there are a lot of visitors from Laos and Cambodia, in view of the smaller population of these countries. We do not have clear data about how tourists from these countries are counted. It is hardly possible though that almost two million Laotians travel around Thailand, enjoying the sites of Bangkok and Phuket. Likely a lot of border crossings for just a day, and some local business trips are included.

Changes from 2015 to 2019 :

Arbitrarily we have included some data on the increase (decrease) of visitors from the most important countries to Thailand, between 2015 and 2019. This may maybe allow to see some trends of what may happen in the future.

For all countries, the increase in visitors was 32.30% in the 4 years between 2015 and 2019. Most Asian countries seem to provide similar increases in visitors. However it is clear that there is a substantial rise in visitors from India, from about 1 million to 2 million visitors, and for local residents, it is clearly visible on Bangkok's streets. As mentioned before, China provides in 2019 close to 11 million visitors. However the last few years, the increase in number of Chinese visitors luckily has not further exploded, and is just a few percentage points above the average increase in visitors.

Russia was also a growing market.This in stark contrast with most other European countries. U.K., Germany and France show only modest increases in visitors to Thailand. The last few years saw also somewhat more American visitors than before.

Interestingly, the number of Australians visiting Thailand has decreased somewhat from 2015 to 2019(-4.63 %), and also the number of visitors from Singapore was not rising anymore (-1.67 %). Sorry, we were not able to put these last two numbers clearly on the chart above.

Source : Ministry of Tourism and Sports (latest updates often only available at Thai language section)