After lagging regional competitors, Thai capital invests in heritage accommodations. My latest with Laure Siegel in the Nikkei Asian Review.
In downtown Bangkok, hardly a week goes by without a soft opening for a high-rise hotel offering a plush but hardly unique experience. With around 35 million visitors a year the Thai capital is a spectacular tourism success, but it is lagging behind regional competitors when it comes to quirky, idiosyncratic accommodation.
Heritage hotels, many in crumbling Rajput palaces, have been one of the main reasons to visit Rajasthan, in India, since the 1960s. More recently, heritage accommodation has proliferated in Luang Prabang in Laos, and in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap in Cambodia.
In Thailand, while there is plenty of remarkable architecture scattered around the older parts of Bangkok, especially in Chinatown and on Rattanakosin Island, countless structures are threatened by construction, lack of maintenance and the absence of official development guidelines….
Read the full story here.