Thailand has done this before and I have complained about it before despite my very limited experience with the country. Most of my information comes from people who have been here considerably longer than I have and they have seen the various ebbs and flows that the country continually goes through.
This time, it is discussion on the part of the government in discussing introducing a 1000 Baht per person "exit fee" to be applied to anyone that visits the country. They have attempted this in the past but ended up doing away with it because it negatively affected tourism numbers. Now that the numbers are way up, they are talking about doing it again, but at twice the price per person that it used to be.
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I knew that tourism was big business here but I had no idea it was that far ahead of everyone else. Of course these numbers are from 4 years ago but also, that was the last year that things weren't thrown all out of whack by Covid taking over the world. We can safely assume that it has returned to similar numbers now because I was here in 2019 and it simply feels a lot busier now than back then.
When I arrived there was no exit fee but there was a lot of talk about how it existed. It was just a booth at the airport and at various other land crossings where before your passport would be stamped, you had to go and pay a 500B fee in order to get a receipt. Immigration would not stamp your passport to let you out of the country without this receipt.
Just for clarification 1000B is what they are talking about introducing now. This is around $35 a person.
There are lots of countries in the world that charge some sort of entrance or exit fee but none of them come even close to Thailand in terms of how many visitors they get per year. I know that the countries that tend to charge this fee are either extremely poor countries that have something the world wants to see like Nepal, or they are island nations that basically exist almost entirely off of tourism such as the Bahamas.
I can't say that there are too many people that would be turned off from coming here at all because of an extra $35 added to their stay, but there are also some tourists from nearby nations that frequently visit here and only stay for a few days at a time and come here regularly. These are the kind of people that are going to be turned off by visiting at all and from what my friends who have been here in the long run say, this is why the previous "exit fee" of 500 Baht per person, was scrapped. Numbers started to drop and when people were asked what they didn't like about visiting Thailand one of the main things was that they felt they were being nickel and dimed around every corner. The top answers as far as things that the government can and does control was national park entrance fees that are sometimes as much as 10x the price for tourists, as well as the 500B exit fee.
In really bad situations people were unaware that there even was a 500B exit fee and had already exchanged all of their Thai Baht for some other currency at the airport exchange booths and then found themselves in a situation where they didn't even have any Baht to pay for the 500B per person. Obviously they would still have access to the booths, but then there were rumors that the only booth that you had access to at that point in the airport security process was charging outrageously bad exchange rates. Basically people were being ripped off one last time before they left the country.
It isn't a lot of money but it just leaves a bad taste in people's mouths when they feel as though they are being treated like cattle with an ATM card from start to finish when they visit somewhere.
I hope that the government thinks beyond the revenue that this 1000B per person proposal would accomplish and think about the potential loss of visitors because the drop in consumers directly because of things like this has already happened. It wasn't even that long ago. You know what thy say about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, right?