Bangkok Blockade: Calls for an apology
KHAO LAK – A top tourism official has told a top-level gathering that more than a million tourists were affected by the eight-day occupation of Bangkok airports.
Mathee Tanmanatragul, president of the Thai Hotels Association, Southern Chapter, said that as well as the 350,000 tourists who were trapped in Thailand, there were a similar number locked out of the country, and hundreds of thousands of others who cancelled bookings.
Khun Mathee told the meeting that Thailand now needed to apologise to those one million people for the impact on their lives, and in some cases, their livelihoods.
Travellers will not forget the bad aspects of the blockade, he said. It was a first in the world: the seizure of an airport by protesters, he added.
”Other people have wars,” he said. ”We have an unprecedented airport seizure in a time of peace. It’s one for the Guinness Book of Records.”
Phuket Wan reported forward bookings for many resorts have dried up since the blockade, in some cases almost entirely.
In the new year, some resorts will struggle to survive, said the chairman of the Standing Committee on Tourism in the Senate, Tunyaratt Achariyachai.
One large hotel in Phuket City, asked to take in trapped tourists as an emergency measure, decided to reject them, the new director of the Tourism Authority of Thailand for the region, Sethaphan Bubbhani, told the Khao Lak meeting.
”We don’t want to help,” the management of the unnamed large hotel told Khun Sethaphan.
Khun Sethaphan has since told the Governor of Phuket about the hotel’s behaviour. ”They should have helped,” he said.
He said the TAT had invested millions of baht in road shows since the 2004 tsunami but all that money had been wasted because of the impression the blockade had created around the world.
Ian Jarrett
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