At Lunar New Year, Thailand pines for its missing Chinese tourists as Covid-19 keeps them away ahead of the Winter Olympics

For the second year in a row, hotspots from Pattaya to Phuket and Bangkok have been starved of income as Beijing’s quarantine measures keep Chinese visitors away

Some businesses have seen incomes drop 80 per cent. Pivoting to the local market offers some respite, but memories linger of the days ‘a lot of people here got rich’

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Novelty bathtub seats at a restaurant built to host Chinese tour groups but now empty. Photo: Vijitra Duangdee

Published: 8:30am, 2 Feb 2022Updated: 9:05am, 2 Feb 2022

At a cliffside restaurant on Thailand’s Koh Larn, where squat teak dining tables overlook an empty white-sand bay, manager Sutthiea Saengsaswi says the last time Chinese tourists were around for the Lunar New Year celebrations her takings went up to around US$6,000 a day. Now they are just US$300 a day.

But this year, for the second year running, there are no Chinese to be seen. Strict quarantine measures Beijing has implemented ahead of the Winter Olympics as part of its zero-tolerance approach to Covid-19 have kept them away.

From Koh Larn restaurants to cabaret shows in Pattaya – a 45 minute ferry ride away – Phuket resorts and Bangkok night markets, entire mini-economies constructed to tap what once appeared to be a bottomless pit of Chinese money have collapsed or been forced to pivot to domestic visitors.

Thai tourist authorities say two million Chinese tourists a year piled into Pattaya before the pandemic. Around 4,000 of them made the day trip to Koh Larn each day on package tours run with conveyor belt-like efficiency: a beach stop, a quick snorkel, souvenirs and a set meal at restaurants like Sutthiea’s workplace at the Sangwan Beach Villa.

“Since they’ve gone, we’ve lost 80 per cent of our income,” she said.

In 2019 Thailand welcomed around 11 million Chinese tourists, over a quarter of the overall number of overseas visitors. Then Covid-19 hit and the Chinese visitors vanished.