Compared with 2019, international visitor arrivals in South-East Asia dropped by 82% in 2020 and 98% in 2021
This was supposed to be the year that South-East Asia’s tourism industry—on life-support since the pandemic struck—began to recover. The Omicron variant, however, delayed the revival. At the end of 2021 several countries began admitting tourists for the first time in nearly two years, only to slam the door shut again when Omicron emerged.
People from outside the region are the lifeblood of the business. They spend half of all tourist dollars even though, in countries with robust domestic tourism, they make up just 33% of visitors, and sometimes as little as 5%. Yet the virus grounded these travellers. . Those figures should improve somewhat this year. As the region opens up, Europeans and Americans will flock back to the sandy beaches of Bali and Phuket. But the recovery will be tentative.
Hotels and restaurants in these countries have long relied on migrant labour from poorer neighbours, such as Indonesia and Myanmar. But lack of work, fierce immigration rules and the absence of much of a safety net prompted many of them to return home during the pandemic. Singapore’s foreign workforce declined by 16% in the 18 months to June. Malaysia’s has decreased by 800,000, from 1.9m in 2018, in part because work permits expired and could not be renewed. At least one-fifth of Thailand’s 2.
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