Southeast Asian countries feel the heat as Chinese tourist arrivals decline

Popular Asian destinations such as Bali and Bangkok are comparatively quiet and empty these days as Chinese tourists are not travelling anymore. Chinese outbound travel boom that amplified Southeast Asia’s inbound travel has now slowed down. Nations such as Thailand and Indonesia had increasingly grown dependent on Chinese tourists, but now face the music with the decrease in Chinese outbound travel.
According to Kampon Adireksombat, Bangkok-based head of economic and financial market research at Siam Commercial Bank Pcl, “The slump in Chinese arrivals and tourism spending is being felt throughout the region. There’s always a concentration risk when relying on one market, and many countries may not be able to find a replacement for growth fast enough.”

According to him, unfortunately, this slump in travel is going to continue until 2020 as long as the trade war is going to go on, and drag down the Chinese economy.

Middle-class Chinese consumers became one of the largest outbound travel markets in the world. The outbound travel of Chinese travellers shot up from 57 million trips in 2010, to 131 million trips in 2017. The figured have been derived by a McKinsey report in 2017, which further found that their first destination of choice was Southeast Asia, making places such as Bali and Bangkok highly dependent on inbound travel from China.

So, chances are that if you travel to Southeast Asian countries now, you will have a lot of free spaces. Plus, you might even get discounts!