From Bangkok to New York

TAT Office in Phuket Town

Khun Suwalai holds a degree from Chulalongkorn University in communication arts She first joined the TAT as a writer, part of a team putting together two English-language magazines. As her career grew, she became involved in many other lines of tourism promotion work, including attracting international conventions and seminars. One of her biggest coups was bringing a group of 2,000 people from a US writers’ association to Thailand. They stayed for a week.

She was later posted to New York, as Director of the TAT office there. “The work was quite different.

Chinese New Year 2005

My job was to sell Thailand in general to US tourists, which was hard. The US is a huge country, and Americans have just about everything they need [for tourism] within the country. Our selling proposition was Thai culture, which they seemed to like,” Khun Suwalai says. The other problem was the distance; to fly from New York to Bangkok in those days took more than 20 hours. To get over this hurdle, she formed a “tag team” with nearby destinations such as Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. “We made a package for them to visit Thailand with a side-trip to another country, say Singapore. It made more sense to them than coming all the way here to visit only one country in Asia,” she explains.

Back to Bangkok

Concert in Patong Beach

After competed her four-year posting in New York, she was assigned to work in Bangkok again. This time the work was related to young people under a youth programme which, she says, was one of her favourite jobs. In February 2004, ten months before the tsunami struck, she was appointed boss of the Region 4 TAT office, based in Phuket, handling some of the best-known tourism spots in Thailand - apart from Phuket her office covers Phang-Nga and Krabi. The tsunami gave the area a different kind of fame. “At that time, we worked very hard, not just as TAT staffers but because we wanted to help tsunami victims. We helped them to get back to their countries as soon as possible,” she explains.

Vegetarian Festival 2006

For months afterwards, people in Phuket kept asking her when the tourists would come back to the Andaman region. They were desperate to see the visitors return – a revival of tourism was, for many, the only way they could put their lives back together again after the massive disaster. The comments these days are rather different, Khun Suwalai says. “This year [Phuket] hotel owners have been complaining to me that they don’t have enough rooms to accommodate all the tourists who want to come here. I consider that a good complaint,” she says with a smile.

The tsunami hit Khao Lak, in Phang Nga, far harder that it hit Phuket. But Khao Lak, too, is recovering. So far it has 2,000 hotel rooms. “By this coming high season [2007-2008], they should have 5,000 rooms ready to welcome visitors. I believe the TAT has done a good job in helping to revive the area,” she adds.

A tiny budget

Vegetarian Festival 2006

TAT headquarters expects to welcome 82 million domestic tourists and 14.8 million visitors from overseas to Thailand this year, spending something around 378 billion baht and 548 billion baht respectively.

In stark contrast, Khun Suwalai’s office received a budget for 2007 of just 10 million baht. She is treating the small number as a challenge. “I’ll have to use the budget carefully. The good thing is that we have always received very good support from local government bodies, especially the Provincial Administration Organisations of the three provinces.” The marketing plan for this year includes stands at a number of overseas travel trade shows including the ASEAN Tourism Forum 2007 in Singapore, Feria Internacional de Turismo 2007 in Madrid, The New York Times Travel Show 2007 in the US and the biggest of them all, ITB in Berlin.

Concern and action

Chinese Opera Actors

Khun Suwalai’s greatest concern these days is building up awareness of environmental matters and standards among both local people and tourists. She shares the Governor of Phuket’s concern that issues such as garbage and traffic need to be looked at seriously before it’s too late. The TAT will therefore be taking 40 youngsters during the school vacation on a two- or three-night camp in Phuket’s last remaining piece of virgin tropical forest, Pra Taew mountain. The idea is to educate them, outside the classroom, about environmental and other important issues, in the hope that they will seize on the concepts and the knowledge and apply them as they grow into adulthood.

In addition, she would like to see someone invest in setting up a hotel training school on the island. “Phuket is the ideal place for this,” she says. “One problem I see at the moment is that we don’t have sufficient experienced hotel staff and tour guides to meet market demand. Someone should set up a proper training school to turn out staff to supply the industry. They could even take it a step further; they could produce students with international skills and feed an even bigger market – the tourism industry worldwide.”