Thailand to reopen Phuket for vaccinated tourists from July

Photographer: Taylor Weidman / Bloomberg

Thailand will dispense with quarantine requirements for vaccinated foreign visitors arriving on the tourist island of Phuket starting July 1, the first major reopening for the tourism-dependent country.

One panel chaired by Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-Ocha approved on Friday the proposal by the Phuket private sector and business groups to inoculate at least 70% of the island’s residents to prepare for the reopening for vaccinated tourists, according to the Minister of Tourism , Phiphat Ratchakitprakarn.

The government plans to test the reopening plan in Phuket before expanding to other major tourist spots, including Koh Samui, to help restart the tourism industry that has been shaken for a year without its millions of tourists, who contributed a fifth of the economy before the pandemic.

Dependence on Tourism

Thailand has become more dependent on foreign visitors in the past decade

Sources: Ministry of Tourism and Sports, National Council for Economic and Social Development

Thailand supports vaccine passport before wider reopening

The approval means that Phuket will reopen three months before the rest of the country, which is expected to receive fully inoculated visitors only in October. Phuket residents will also be prioritized in launching the vaccine, with more than 930,000 doses expected to be administered before the reopening, Bhummikitti Ruktaengam, president of the island’s tourism association, said separately earlier this week.

Shares in Thai hotel operators rose on Friday, with the SET Tourism & Leisure Index up 2.4%, outpacing the 0.2% gain of the benchmark SET index. Minor International Pcl, the largest hotel operator in the country, rose 3.2%, Asset World Corp. Pcl gained 3%, Central Plaza Hotel Pcl e Erawan Group Pcl advanced more than 4% each.

An early reopening could potentially add more than 30 billion baht ($ 963 million) to the economy, but its success depends on international vaccine passport agreements and negotiations with other countries to allow free travel, said Bhummikitti.

Ready to Travel

“There are people who are fully vaccinated and ready to travel. But they would choose only destinations that vaccinated their residents and do not require quarantine, ”said Yuthasak Supasorn, governor of the Thai Tourism Authority, which expects at least 100,000 visitors to Phuket in the third quarter.

Despite an outbreak of infections earlier this year, Thailand largely contained the pandemic, with only 92 deaths and 28,577 cases during the course of the pandemic. This encouraged the government to shorten the quarantine for visitors to 10 days of two weeks starting April 1, with a plan to reduce it further to one week for those with proof of vaccination traveling to Phuket, Koh Samui, Chiang Mai and three other destinations .

The government will continue to gradually relax control measures by considering the health of the economy and of the people equally important, Prayuth said on Thursday.

Central bank of thailand reduced its growth forecast for this year to 3%, while reducing its estimate of tourist arrivals to 3 million, compared to the December estimate of 5.5 million. The pandemic devastated the country’s tourism industry, which generated more than $ 60 billion in revenue for some 40 million foreign visitors in 2019.

– With the help of Suttinee Yuvejwattana and Anuchit Nguyen

(Updates with the market reaction in the fifth paragraph.)