BANGKOK: Chinese tourists visiting Thailand for Lunar New Year are worried about being kidnapped by gangsters to work in hellish scam centres, despite efforts to reassure them.
Chinese nationals topped the list of visitors to Thailand last year, with nearly seven million making the trip to Thailand in 2024.
But high-profile kidnappings on the Thai-Myanmar border have sent a chill through the market at a peak period, with a reported 10,000 trips cancelled during the Lunar New Year holidays.
Thai aviation chiefs say they expect arrivals from China over the Jan 24 to Feb 2 period to be down on 2024, despite higher traveller numbers overall.
Even those who have brave the trip are uneasy.
“I didn’t dare to tell my family, so I came here secretly,” Gao, a 29-year-old tourist from Hainan province who gave only one name, told AFP at Wat Pho, the Thai capital’s Temple of the Reclining Buddha.
Fears were heightened after Chinese actor Wang Xing was rescued from a cyber fraud centre in Myanmar earlier this month.
Wang said he was lured to Thailand on the promise of an audition, only to be whisked off and smuggled across the border.
The fact that kidnappings appear to be carried out by Chinese speakers is making tourists wary.
“When we are here, we try not to talk too much to people who speak Chinese,” Hu Yangfan, a 25-year-old tourist from Zhejiang in eastern China told AFP near the Grand Palace, one of Bangkok’s most famous landmarks.
