PM Yingluck gave an opening speech that tourism policy is one of the important policies to generate revenue to the country and the government has been closely monitoring the policy. The meeting today aimed to provide the opportunity for related agencies to present problems and progress of each project.

Later, the meeting considered emergency issues to be executed in the strategy to drive the government’s policy to generate THB 2 trillion revenue from tourism within 2015 with 6 main issues as follows:

1.      Support tourist market (Tourism Authority of Thailand)

1.1              Domestic market

1.2              International market

1.3              TSA

2.      Develop tourist attractions (Department of Tourism)

2.1              Develop and uplift the quality of tourist attractions

2.2              Study for future investment in mega project to develop new tourist attraction

3.      Logistics network improvement to support tourism (Ministry of Transportation)

3.1              Develop routes linking tourist attractions

3.2              Study on capacity management of each airport

4.      Building confidence in tourism

4.1              Increase management efficiency (the Royal Thai Police)

4.2              Increase confidence in tourist’s safety (the Royal Thai Police)

4.3              Increase efficiency in facilitating tourists (the Royal Thai Police)

4.4              Set up administration center (Ministry of Tourism and Sports)

5.      Facilitating

5.1              Increase the speed of immigration, cancel immigration 6(the Royal Thai Police), Visa on Arrival (the Royal Thai Police)

5.2              Revoke tourist visa and multiple visa fee (Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

6.      Product and service

6.1 Establish standard, match demand and supply (Department of Tourism)

6.2 Review rules and regulations regarding hotel operating license application, strict with hotels (Ministry of Interior)

6.3 Review labor readiness (Ministry of Labor)

Responsible agencies reported the progress of each project as well as the project assigned during the 1st/ 2012 workshop on 17 June 2012 at Pattaya. For example, tourist attraction improvement under the famous tourist attractions improvement project by the Department of Tourism. The department has installed wastewater treatment and waste disposal process, improved landscape, facilities, tourist information center, public toilets, safety system and service standard. 29 urgent spots including island, beach, natural, historical and cultural spots will be completed between 2012 and 2013. The Royal Barge museum renovation by the Royal Thai Army, Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Tourism and Sports under the theme “living museum” with multimedia and light systems linking temple-palace and water way tourism.

For tourist facilitation at Suvarnabhumi airport, automatic passport checking channel was opened on 11 April 2012. The channel can serve Thai passengers with E-passport of around 7,000-8,000 persons per day and until 30 June 2012 the channel has served more than 596,080 passengers. The channel can fasten the process for more than 50%. For the cancellation of immigration station 6 for Thai passengers, the issue is now under the consideration of the Office of the Electronics Transaction Commission.

Niwatthamrong Bunsongphaisan, Ministers to the PM’s office, revealed after the meeting that PM Yingluck repeated during the meeting that every unit must develop and present monthly action plan for the next 1 year explaining how the unit plans to execute in order to achieve the goal. Projects listed in the action plan must be emergency projects. Projects under normal budget can be directly executed while projects that require extra budget must be further studied and presented to the meeting for consideration. However, those projects must be emergency projects under the action plan only.