Thailand’s tourism operators expect long-haul arrivals to fall in 2026 as the conflict in the Middle East raises travel costs and dents spending, the Bangkok Post reported. Some in the industry now see the country’s medical tourism as one way to steady the shortfall. Long-haul arrivals reached a record 10.8 million in 2025, and operators told the paper they expect this year’s figure to come in below that. Thailand’s tourism authority had set a target of 11.6 million long-haul arrivals within an overall goal of 36.7 million visitors. That projection is now in doubt.
“Thailand’s tourism sector will definitely be hit by this new storm of events,” said Sanga Ruangwattanakul, president of the Khao San Road Business Association. He told the Bangkok Post that arrivals this year could dip more severely than last. His concern is mechanical rather than abstract. The conflict drives up oil prices, Ruangwattanakul said, which feeds inflation and raises airfares. Airspace closures and flight cancellations across the region cut the supply of seats, he added, and push long-haul fares higher still. Fears around the Strait of Hormuz have added to the pressure on energy prices, the report said.
Uneven exposure
Exposure is not spread evenly across Thailand’s tourism, the Bangkok Post reported. Around 80 per cent of visitors to the Khao San area are European, which leaves districts that depend on that market exposed to any pullback in European travel, the paper said. That risk runs through the second and third quarters and into the Songkran holiday, which usually draws a large European crowd.
Other operators reported a softer immediate effect. Morrakot Kuldilok, president of the eastern chapter of the Thai Hotels Association, told the Bangkok Post that most long-haul guests booked into Pattaya had postponed rather than cancelled. The Middle East conflict had not yet hit Pattaya hard as the high season closed, she said. That resilience rests on nearer markets, the report said: Indian, Chinese and Russian visitors can still reach Thailand on direct flights. Long-haul travellers matter more to Pattaya than the calm suggests. They make up 40 per cent of high-season visitors and 20 per cent in the low season, the paper said, and their longer stays mean fewer of them translates into lower average spending.
Concentration and the pivot
There is a first-principles way to read a quarter like this. A destination that leans on one distant source market inherits that market’s shocks, and Thailand’s long-haul exposure is the same concentration risk that runs through medical tourism when a single region supplies most of the high-value patients. Khao San’s 80 per cent European share and Pattaya’s 40 per cent long-haul high-season share are the demand-side version of a pattern that also empties clinics when a source market cannot travel. The conflict is the symptom on display; the strategy is whatever spreads the risk.
That is where the medical tourism pivot enters, and it should be read as an announced intent rather than a delivered result. Kuldilok pressed for faster market diversification, pointing to the rebounding Chinese market, the Bangkok Post reported. The tourism authority’s governor, Thapanee Kiatphaibool, said the agency was working to offset the Gulf instability. In the short term that means pushing domestic travel, she said, and over the longer term building Thailand into an aviation hub with more direct flights. Expanding medical tourism and wellness travel, including for patients from the conflict-affected Gulf, sits alongside those moves. That same instability is cutting Gulf patient flows into Asia’s hospitals, and Thailand’s turn toward medical tourism as a hedge against a wider visitor slump is the same instinct read from the demand side.
A pivot to medical tourism does not fill the gap in the quarter it is announced. Building patient volume takes accreditation, source markets and referral links that are not stood up in a season. The Gulf demand Thailand hopes to attract is the same demand the conflict has made harder to move. A near-term test is measurable and close. Whether long-haul arrivals hold above or fall below the 10.8 million of 2025, whether Songkran and the fourth-quarter high season come in near the tourism authority’s targets, and whether the medical tourism the industry is now talking up shows as actual arrivals will tell operators how much of the shortfall the pivot can carry. The rest simply waits on the Middle East.
