BANGKOK, 27 February 2015 – The Association of Thai Travel Agents (ATTA) revealed most of foreign tourists came to Thailand through services of travel agents and tour operators.
According to ATTA’s statistics recorded during 1 Jan – 20 Feb 2015, 741,000 foreign tourists relied on the service to arrange their visits to Thailand, an increase of 51.83%. Of that number, 387,000 were Chinese, followed by 51,900 Russians.
ATTA continued that Asian tourists were still the main market for Thai tourism, accounting for 70.4% of the foreign visitors while Russians represented 7% of the market. Visitors from Western Europe were on a decline, falling to 4.4% during the period mentioned.
Asian market began showing sign of recovery with more arrivals from Japan, South Korea, India, Taiwan and Hong Kong while the number of Europeans kept on decreasing due to the ongoing economic recession.
Among the ASEAN visitors, the Vietnamese recorded the highest growth of 230%, making Vietnam the second most interesting market after China.
