beyondbrics

South-east Asia has a new challenger on the tourism block: Burma.

The ministry of hotels and tourism announced in June that arrivals were up almost 25 per cent for the first five months of the year, statistics that are supported by anecdotal evidence. A traveller looking for a last-minute room in Rangoon last week found the first hotel he tried fully booked – and this is the low season.

Shwedagon Pagoda, Rangoon

Unspoilt beaches like Nga Poli and Ngwe Saung are being compared to those in Thailand before developers embarked on their love affair with concrete and low-rent bars; Burma’s extraordinary temples of Bagan are like Cambodia’s Angkor Wat before the rush; and the mountainous north – particularly Putao – is one of the last great unspoilt landscapes in the world.

Burma is looking at a little over 350,000 tourists this year, a drop in the ocean compared to Thailand’s forecast of 15m arrivals.

To give an idea of the potential: Thailand has perhaps a couple of dozen resort islands in the Andaman Sea, places like Koh Pha Ngan and Kho Phi Phi. Burma’s Mergui archipelago consists of more than 800 islands, most of them untouched.

Burma used to be off the map, figuratively speaking, because of the political environment and reports that Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Laureate and opposition leader, wanted to discourage tourism.

But that has changed. She now supports independent tourism: “I think we are going to encourage individual tourism, encourage tourists to stay in certain kinds of hotels, ethical tourism if you like,” she told the FT’s David Pilling in January.

According to local media, there are already 22 foreign owned hotels in Burma.

“Singapore has topped foreign investment in Myanmar’s hotel sector with 597.75 million U.S dollars, followed by Thailand with 263.25 million USD, Japan with 183.01 million USD, China’s Hong Kong with 77 million USD, Malaysia with 20 million USD and Britain with 3.4 million USD,” the Xinhua news agency reported last week, although the so-called British money is likely to be mostly Chinese money being funnelled through the British Virgin Islands – a reminder that not only does Burma have the destinations, it also lies sandwiched between the markets of enormous markets of China and India.

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[3] India: swimming in the laps of luxury
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[5] Can a boy band tempt EM tourists back to Japan?
[6] Abramovich brings Midas touch to Gorky Park
[7] South Korea: time to chill out
[8] UAE: paradise for summer bachelors
[9] UK holidays for Indian schoolchildren
[10] Brazilians in Miami shop ’til they drop