Few changes to outbound Thailand tours

The city’s travel agents have arranged to change travel itineraries on outbound tours to Thailand, and some local residents postponed their trips to the country on Friday, due to a 30-day ban on entertainment activities imposed by the Thailand government after the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s on Thursday.
‘The [Thai] government called on the country to avoid “joyful events” for 30 days and to dress in mourning for a year,’ news agency Bloomberg noted on Friday.
However, the majority of outbound package tours to Thailand have not been greatly affected by the restrictions. Minor changes have been made to travel itineraries, and some travellers have chosen to delay their booked tours to a later date instead, Business Daily was informed by several of the city’s travel agents.
“The impact on outbound tours to Thailand is less from the King’s death. The ban only does not allow people to go to nightclubs and party for 30 days. And most of the packaged tours organized by the city’s travel agents don’t usually go to those affected places,” Andy Wu Keng Kuong, president of the Macau Travel Industry Council, told Business Daily.
Mr. Wu also noted that the majority of package tours from Macau to Thailand go to shopping malls and spa resorts, with few having nightclubs on their itineraries.

Changes
Local travel agent Multinational Youth Travel Agency Ltd. told Business Daily that about 50 per cent of outbound tours to Thailand organized by the company had been postponed on Friday, after its customers received a warning on Thursday night regarding the imposed ban.
“We use social media to inform our customers regarding the effect on the tours. At least half of them have decided to postpone their tours to another day. However, another half decided not to change anything because they had already applied for their leave from work in advance,” a spokesperson from the travel agency said.
The agency said that all changes made to the tours during the affected 30 days are free of charge, including flight ticket and tour changes.
Some other local travel agents are also seeing little impact from the King’s death and are mostly changing their travel itineraries to other places in Thailand instead of going to its capital.
“Some changes have been made to our Thailand tours such as not going to the nightclubs and partying. We have to choose other attractions to replace these,” Mike Hin, marketing manager of Hong Thai Travel Services (Macau) Ltd. said.
In addition, Hin revealed that no postponements or cancellations of Thailand tours organized by his company had been requested by his customers so far.
Another local travel agent, EGL Tours (Macau) Co Ltd, told Business Daily that the bans do not affect them directly.
“Those banned places are not included in our itineraries, and do not affect our tours scheduled to Thailand,” Sabrina Iong Ut Iong, general manager of EGL Tours (Macau) Co Ltd, said.

Popular destination
In terms of Macau residents travelling to South East Asia and using the services of travel agencies, Thailand remained the most popular destination, accounting for 40 per cent of outbound travellers, or 7,516, of the total during the second quarter of this year, according to the latest data from the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC).
Thailand was also the most travelled to destination in South East Asia by local residents last year, accounting for 38 per cent of the total, or 34,436.