Tourism-related operators must focus on short-haul tourists to offset a falling number of long-haul tourists, who have been hurt by soaring travel costs. Prakit Chinamourphong, president of Thai Hotels Association (THA), said the number of long-haul tourists, particularly from Europe, has declined by 10% since the start of the year as higher oil prices have increased travel costs by over 30% from last year.
The number of chartered flights is decreasing significantly due to rising fuel surcharges. However, the number of short-haul tourists is growing. (Bangkok Post)
It’s very unfortunate that TAT (Tourism Authority of Thailand) has stopped the publication of the statistics of international arrivals (by country and port of entry)… Last datas are for… december 2007.
Before, it was easy to follow the situation, with only 2 months time lag, and creating nice charts…
Now we have to rely on bad reports from the thai press, and selected datas…
What do they want to hide ? Is there something to hide ? 😉
Give us back our stats ! 😉
Thailand Crisis 
Are’t the number of arrivals measured by the Immigration Bureau?
Indeed. And that was the source of TAT’s datas. And TAT was the only agency to publish them, on a monthly basis.
Other agencies use those datas, but on a yearly basis. For instance, the National Statistics Office (yes it exists 😉 ).
http://service.nso.go.th/nso/nso_center/project/search_center/23project-en.htm
So I guess we have to wait 2009 to have the figures of 2008. 😦