Figurin' Stuff

I was thinking about when the new airport opens later this year about what effect it is going to have on tourism in Pattaya.

Pattaya sees about 1 million tourists a year - about 10% of all arrivals in Thailand (10 million people), plus another 1 million day-tripping tourists from Bangkok, or residents of Pattaya pretending to be tourists. (I myself represent 12 tourist arrivals each year.)

If one out of every fifty arrivals in Thailand is a person who would have gone to Pattaya if the airport was only an hour closer, that's 200,000 people. If they add the high speed train from Bangkok to Pattaya, that's easily another 400,000 arrivals in Pattaya annually, I would guess.

Pattaya already is woefully unprepared to handle the 2 million tourists it gets each year, with water shortages, overflowing sewers, traffic jams, crime, and beaches that are already abused far beyond anything they can accommodate. The airport is going to turn Pattaya into a teeming hell of tourists who can afford no better place, and that no better place wants to have visiting.

At least there is hope:

Pattaya is a ruined place. This is only going to increase substantially when the airport opens. There is nothing of value here for a tourist. There is nothing here that can't be found elsewhere in Thailand for a tourist. Once the Eurotrash and Russian mafia families vacationing here figure that out, there goes one fourth of arrivals. Once the hotel owners on Phukhet and Samui discover that they can make millions off of retarded Chinese people who couldn't be bothered to pick up a travel brochure before signing up for an all-expenses-paid tour of Thailand's shitstains, and snatch them away from Pattaya to greener pastures, there goes another quarter of Pattaya's arrivals.

What does that leave? Sex tourists. Old and young, but overall relaxed and groovy sex tourists. Send all the 20-something party animals to Ko Tao for the full moon parties. Send all the Chinese package tours to Phuket. Send all the Eurotrash to Ko Samui. Send all the Russians to Ko Chang. Leave behind the half-a-million-or-so guys who just want to sit in a bar all night, bouncing a Thai girl on each knee, kicking back with their friends, and then sleeping in until 2:00 in the afternoon. You see... Pattaya does have one thing: Entertainment (with a capital E and that rhymes with P and that stands for ___sy). As things stand now, Pattaya is the number one place in Thailand to go for Entertainment, beating Bangkok hands down in every category. So, what will become of Pattaya?

It will become a town of letches. A town of letches who want their town to be a little bit nicer, a little bit cleaner, and a little bit friendlier than it is at the moment. That is the hope for Pattaya's future.