Thailand Targets High-Value Retail Tourism to Spread Spending Beyond Five Hubs
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Thailand wants to redirect visitor spending away from five core hubs that generate 70 percent of all tourism revenue, pushing retail and hospitality spending into 72 secondary provinces. Five areas, Bangkok, Phuket, Chonburi, Surat Thani and Chiang Mai, currently take the lion’s share of tourism revenue, leaving the rest of the country with 30 percent.
The policy overhaul, presented at the Nation Forum in Bangkok, links state tourism promotion with private shopping mall developments and international business events to drive longer stays and higher average transactions. The Tourism Authority of Thailand aims for revenue expansion of 5 to 10 percent in 2027 by targeting spending per head rather than headline arrival volumes.
The Mall Group Pushes Local Merchandise into Luxury Spaces
Commercial operators are restructuring their tenant mix and marketing calendars around regional sourcing to capture higher margins from international travellers. Department store operator The Mall Group is positioning provincial crafts, specialty produce and regional design as high-margin merchandise displayed alongside legacy luxury labels in flagship venues such as the EM District.
Voralak Tulaphorn, chief marketing officer of The Mall Group, pointed to campaigns such as Khad Thai, which showed more than 40 regional durian varieties, to prove that local products command premium pricing when merchandised properly. The retail group is also integrating entertainment assets, staging international concerts at UOB LIVE and deploying home-grown intellectual property like the Butterbear character to pull foreign shoppers into its Bangkok properties.
For retail landlords and brand owners, the strategic pivot answers years of margin compression in low-end mass tourism. Selling cheap souvenirs and chasing tour bus throughput created overcrowding and environmental costs while doing little for domestic retail revenues. High-value merchandising requires retailers to curate authentic regional supply chains, though smaller artisanal suppliers often struggle with the inventory scale, packaging standards and payment terms required by tier-one shopping centres.
“Under its Muang Mee Dee program, more than 50 provinces competed in 2025 to develop cultural assets for event delegates, with Nakhon Ratchasima and Si Sa Ket selected as winners.”
Spreading MICE Spending Beyond Established Cities
Corporate events and trade exhibitions are being deployed to channel visitor spending beyond the usual commercial centres. The Thailand Convention and Exhibition Bureau has certified 16 destinations for meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions across the country, aiming to disperse corporate budgets into provincial economies.
Under its Muang Mee Dee program, more than 50 provinces competed in 2025 to develop cultural assets for event delegates, with Nakhon Ratchasima and Si Sa Ket selected as winners. The convention bureau is structuring delegate packages to integrate local food supplies, regional crafts and community tours into corporate itineraries.
The push directly tackles Thailand’s uneven competitiveness scorecard. While Bangkok secured first place among cities in Conde Nast Traveller’s 2026 UK Readers’ Choice Awards, the country ranked 38th in the World Economic Forum’s 2026 Travel and Tourism Development Index, up from 47th in 2024. That earlier 2024 assessment scored Thailand at 4.96 for price competitiveness and 4.89 for air transport, but gave it just 2.86 for cultural resources, highlighting poor transport links between major gateways and secondary provinces.
Former Move Forward Party leader Pita Limjaroenrat noted that unmanaged mass arrivals drove up local rents and municipal waste without delivering proportional retail gains to host communities. He urged authorities to measure sector health through visitor dwell time, spending per trip and provincial income distribution rather than border arrival counts.
State planners now face the logistical test of building transport links that can deliver international shoppers to smaller workshops and regional producers before the 2027 revenue targets come due.