As coronavirus resurges in Thailand, tourism businesses go on life support

Just 30 per cent of businesses are still operating in the country after a long initial Covid-19 lockdown, with more suffering expected to come

Caught between trying to save the economy and stopping a public health catastrophe, the government has been accused of doing neither

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Kampon Tansacha, the owner of Noongnooch Tropical Garden, directs his landscaping crew in making refinements to the park. Photo: Vijitra Duangdee

Published: 8:15am, 8 Jan 2021Updated: 3:49pm, 8 Jan 2021

Helping to push a stone slab with a carving of a Hindu deity into the earth, Kampon Tansacha said he faced a stark choice in deciding what to do with the army of staff that looked after his botanical garden outside the Thai resort city of Pattaya: close the garden and let them go unpaid, or keep it open and soak up the losses with no visitors.

Before the coronavirus pandemic took hold, Noongnooch Tropical Garden used to welcome up to 9,000 visitors a day – mostly Chinese tour groups – to drift across the 670 acres of immaculately landscaped gardens, which are studded with stupas, nurseries and life-size statues of dinosaurs.

“Then we went down to just a few hundred Thais each day,” he told This Week in Asia, before finally shutting down on Monday as part of the latest Covid-19 controls sweeping Southeast Asia’s second-biggest economy.

An aerial shot of an empty maze at Noongnooch Tropical Garden, which used to welcome an average of 9,000 visitors a day before the coronavirus pandemic hit. Photo: Vijitra Duangdee

To keep his 3,000 staff members working, Kampon has been busy refining the 40-year-old gardens, which before the virus upended global travel drew more than three million visitors a year, making it a fixture of global garden “Top 10” lists.

“We’re losing income every day,” he said. “I told my staff we have two choices: close the park or keep it open, but they’ll have to work extra hard so that we’re ready to receive visitors when everything is open again.”