Thailand has permitted foreigners who have been vaccinated against Covid to enter Phuket without having to undergo mandatory hotel quarantine. Yuthasak Supasorn, the governor of the Tourism Authority of Thailand, who prefers to call this experiment the ‘Phuket sandbox model’, said that the exercise would begin from July onwards. By July, the authorities expect to inoculate almost 70 per cent […]
Phuket: No quarantine for vaccinated travellers from July
Thailand has permitted foreigners who have been vaccinated against Covid to enter Phuket without having to undergo mandatory hotel quarantine. Yuthasak Supasorn, the governor of the Tourism Authority of Thailand, who prefers to call this experiment the ‘Phuket sandbox model’, said that the exercise would begin from July onwards. By July, the authorities expect to inoculate almost 70 per cent of the population in Phuket.
Supasorn also announced that from April onwards, the current hotel quarantine period of 14 days will be halved to seven days for fully vaccinated visitors to Chiang Mai, Krabi, Pattaya, Phuket, Koh Samui and Phang Nga. From October onwards, the government plans to extend the quarantine waiver model to five more destinations within the country.
Vaccinated visitors will also need to furnish Covid-negative certificates and would need to download a mobile tracking application.
Deputy Phuket governor Phichet Panaphong had been quoted as saying that before Covid-19, the average income of people living in Phuket stood at THB 40,000 per month, while in February the average income had plummeted to about THB 8,000 a month. “Without intervention, the average income of locals is estimated to drop further to THB 1,964 per person per month in July, well below the poverty line,” he had said.
The slump in Thailand’s tourism sector slump has continued since last April’s tight travel curbs that saw foreign arrivals fall 99.8 per cent in January from a year earlier. As against nearly 40 million tourists who arrived in Thailand in 2019, only 6.7 million managed to enter the kingdom in 2020.
Thailand’s cabinet on Tuesday approved financial measures worth THB 350 billion baht to help businesses cope with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic as the economy will take time to recover, government officials said. The tourism-reliant economy contracted 6.1 per cent last year, its deepest slump in over two decades, with tourism devastated by travel curbs and other domestic impacts.