Healthy appetite for Thailand hotels as investors stay bullish

[BANGKOK] Judging by the number of new hotels under construction or opening their doors in Thailand, the Covid-19 pandemic has had little impact on investors’ enthusiasm for the sector.

Property consulting firm JLL estimates that, in Bangkok alone, about 7,000 new rooms came on the market in 2022. Another 7,000 are set to open this year, and about 3,000 are due in 2024.

While many of these properties were already under construction before the Covid-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, Thailand already had an abundance of hotel rooms in 2019 – as many as 200,000, according to some reports – when some 40 million foreign tourists visited the country and spent 1.91 trillion baht (S$73.8 billion).