The Andaman's Slow Return to Form

On Koh Lanta's Long Beach, the beach chairs are out in orderly rows again, but Sutthirat Klinsukhon, who has rented sun loungers here for eleven years, counts empty patches that would have been unthinkable in high season before 2020. "We are maybe seventy, seventy-five percent of what we were," she said, gesturing down a stretch that used to fill entirely by ten in the morning. "The Europeans are back. The Chinese groups are not, not the way they were."

That single sentence captures the shape of the Andaman coast's recovery more precisely than most official tourism statistics. Thailand's west coast — Phuket, Krabi, Koh Lanta, the Phi Phi islands — has clawed back most of its pre-pandemic visitor volume in aggregate, according to figures from the Tourism Authority of Thailand's Phuket office, but the composition of that recovery is lopsided in ways that matter enormously to who actually profits from it.

Two recoveries, not one

European and Scandinavian long-stay travellers, historically the backbone of Phuket and Krabi's high-season economy, returned faster and in larger numbers than almost anyone in the industry predicted, drawn by direct charter and scheduled flights that airlines restored more aggressively on European routes than Asian ones. Russian travel, cut off from much of Europe by sanctions and flight bans since 2022, has redirected heavily toward Phuket, to the point that some agents in Patong now describe Russian visitors as the single largest nationality by headcount on certain weeks — a shift few in the industry anticipated and fewer still know how to plan around long-term given the geopolitical uncertainty attached to it.

Chinese group tourism, which before 2020 accounted for close to a third of Phuket's annual arrivals and underwrote an entire ecosystem of budget hotels, tour buses and duty-free retail, has come back only partially. Direct flights from second-tier Chinese cities that used to run several times weekly to Phuket have not all resumed, and a broader slowdown in Chinese outbound leisure spending, along with well-documented safety concerns following a string of scam and safety incidents involving Chinese tourists in the region, has kept group numbers well below 2019 levels even as individual, higher-spending Chinese travellers have started to reappear.

"The Europeans are back. The Chinese groups are not, not the way they were."

Who is left carrying the gap

The unevenness hits different parts of the industry differently. High-end resorts catering to European and increasingly Middle Eastern long-stay guests — a segment growing steadily out of Gulf states with new direct flight capacity — report occupancy at or above 2019 levels for the November-to-March season. Budget guesthouses and the tour-bus economy built around group travel have not recovered nearly as well, and several operators on Phi Phi described a two-tier market in which the beaches look full but the money moving through them is concentrated in fewer, higher-spending hands than before.

Kritsada Sae-lim, who runs a small dive operation out of Ao Nang, said the shift has forced him to retool his business model entirely, dropping the walk-in group snorkel trips that used to fill his boats and focusing instead on smaller, higher-margin certified diving courses aimed at European and Australian long-stay visitors. "Five years ago I needed forty people a day through cheap trips. Now I need twelve people paying properly," he said. "It's a different business. I'm not sure it's a worse one, but it took two years to figure out."

The environmental dividend, and its limits

One unambiguous silver lining of the slower, differently composed recovery has been reef and marine health in some of the most heavily visited dive sites, where reduced boat traffic during the pandemic gave coral formations around Koh Phi Phi Leh and the Similan Islands genuine recovery time that marine biologists at Kasetsart University's Phuket research station have documented in follow-up surveys. Whether that recovery survives a full return to pre-pandemic visitor volumes, rather than the current partial, unevenly distributed one, remains the open question hanging over the entire coast.