With the summer-holiday season now under way in the northern hemisphere, Thailand is giving families the business-class treatment. The country’s immigration department has created special lanes at the four main airports to fast-track visiting families from China, Thailand’s largest inbound market. Dubbed “The Happy Chinese Summer Channel”, these fast lanes are cutting waiting times from 40 minutes to 15 for those bound for Phuket, Chang Mai and beyond. As all parents know, travelling overseas with young children can be challenging, so this special arrangement is bound to go down well with put-upon mums and weary dads flying in from Beijing or Shanghai. But the real strength of this promotion, as with most successful marketing campaigns, is its authenticity.
Thai airports have long treated families from all countries and travel classes like royalty, with VIP lanes often full of children. During April’s Songkran holiday, for example, kids waiting at luggage carousels reportedly received cuddly toys depicting Moo Deng, a pygmy hippo housed at Khao Kheow Open Zoo. Family travel is one of this decade’s biggest trends in Asia. Thailand’s tourism authority should lean into this and start promoting the myriad other ways that the country welcomes parents, from the nation’s friendly electric tuk-tuk drivers and Thai Airways’ considerate air stewards to the fact that passengers on the BTS Skytrain are almost always willing to give up their seats.
Before I moved to Bangkok from Hong Kong, I was frequently told how good the Thai capital was for families. Based on my experiences of being stuck in traffic on Sukhumvit Road, I assumed that this was nonsense. But two years later I’m evangelising the same thing. Entertaining children seems to cost an arm and a leg elsewhere but Bangkok offers so much to do for free. Take the bright-yellow, duck-shaped pedalos in Lumpini Park – you can spend a day riding one of these boats at no charge. Afterwards you might catch a free open-air concert by the Royal Bangkok Symphony Orchestra at the nearby bandstand.
The Thai capital might not have museums of the same calibre as London’s V&A or The Met in New York but its Children’s Discovery Museum is free for all and you can spend an entire day digging up bones in a sandpit, splashing around in a fountain and riding on the back of a fire engine. This is a side of Thailand that many abroad are unfamiliar with. Adults can get up to all types of mischief here but this is a country that puts families first.
Chambers is Monocle’s Asia editor. Wondering where to go in the Thai capital? Be sure to consult our new Bangkok City Guide.
I don’t know how I persuaded them but they gave their permission. I was 16 years old when my parents agreed that, if I saved enough money, I could buy an Interrail card and spend a whole month of the summer school holidays travelling around Europe by train with a friend. At the time I had a job at a local supermarket where, every Friday night and all-day Saturday, I got to stack the shelves, ferret out yoghurts beyond their sell-by dates and, my favourite, sit at the checkout. And so the piggy bank gradually filled up and an Interrail pass was purchased (entitling the bearer to free rail travel across Europe). Also bought: a Thomas Cook “European Timetable” that was about the size of a phone directory (if you remember them) and which listed all the key train schedules.
Over the following weeks we covered a lot of territory. One day we were in Sweden and the next in Austria. We even made it down to the south of France. Our accommodation was a tent or a night train (we scanned the directory for ones that would allow for a decent night’s sleep). We lived off of bread and cheese. My contribution to the GDP of each country we visited was close to zero – I was a cheapskate backpacker. We were living the dream.
There is a good and much-needed debate taking place about how cities can manage tourism in a way that delivers benefits to the citizenry and doesn’t create models where the prevalence of Airbnb’s, for example, erodes the availability of affordable housing for locals to rent. This is a wise and healthy conversation to have. So why does some of the language used make me uneasy?
When you speak to politicians, activists and tourist chiefs, often their proposed solution to the problems they are facing is to get rid of the “bad tourists” and focus on the “good” ones. They talk about making more money from fewer people (day trippers are to be replaced by folk happy to stay a week in five-star accommodation), of attracting people who will spend time delving into the local culture and not just drinking cocktails on the beach all day. In this battle to reshape tourism, the 16-year-old me would today struggle to find myself on any city’s wish list of potential visitors, even if, like many a backpacker, that hurried trip gave me a passion to return to cities again and again and hand over increasing amounts of my salary.
But even the backpacker is held in higher esteem than the true scum of the earth: the mass tourist. These people are the lowest. They arrive by coach and cruise ship, they buy all-inclusive hotel deals, they drink to excess, they move in swarms and they don’t even appreciate the local handicrafts.
Before my parents dropped dead, they were rather partial to a coach-trip holiday organised by their club. Should such people really be excluded from having a holiday just because they can no longer drive? I got chatting to a retired lady at Palma airport the other day who had just been on an all-inclusive holiday and loved it – her husband had died and she wanted, she told me, somewhere that would sort everything for her. Does she need to stay at home now? I know lots of people who love a cruise – are they at fault when they step off the ship if the streets fill up? Or is the problem port-city leaders who fail to control the size or number of ships docking? When a family just wants a week at the beach, the only holiday they’ll get all year, does this really make them “bad” tourists?
Cities that struggle from over-demand should, of course, look at how they reduce the total numbers of visitors. But when you start doing this on the basis of wealth and class then you lose sympathy. Travel is a wonderful thing. Time away is an amazing privilege. Sun on our faces is restorative. Let’s not make this a freedom unavailable to nice regular folk – or smelly teenage backpackers.
