Visa Bets on Experience-Led Travel to Elevate Thailand Tourism

 

 

As affluent travellers seek experiences over things, Visa's new Destinations programme aims to help Thailand capture more of their spending power.

 

Thailand's tourism industry is entering a new chapter, one defined less by how many people visit and more by how much they spend once they arrive. That is the assessment of Stephen Karpin, Visa's Regional President for Asia Pacific, who spoke exclusively to The Nation this week as the payments giant launched Visa Destinations in Thailand, its first country-level rollout of the programme anywhere in the world.

 

"We've stopped talking about post-pandemic recovery in terms of growth rates," Karpin said. "We now see travel as an increasingly big part of how people are spending all around the world, and here in Asia Pacific it's on a steady pace of double-digit growth as a share of total spend."

 

According to Ministry of Tourism and Sports (Thailand), the country welcomed 33 million visitors last year, generating an estimated US$50 billion for the economy. But the more striking figure, Karpin said, concerns repeat visitors. They account for roughly 20 per cent of active cardholders, yet represent more than 34 per cent of total tourist spending, close to double the outlay of the average first-time traveller.

 

"Once people get a taste of Thailand, they're able to link what they want to experience end to end — dining, retail, wellness, Bangkok, Chiang Mai," he said. "What we've determined is that we can help even first-time visitors do the same by linking everything together so they can spend more time here and experience more, with the confidence that they'll be able to pay securely."
 

 

 

 

 

The affluent traveller effects

Much of that shift is being driven by what Visa terms "affluent" travellers — broadly, households earning upwards of US$200,000 a year. Although a small slice of the travelling public, Karpin said this segment spends at roughly three times the rate of the average Visa cardholder and accounts for around a quarter of total spending across travel, tourism and luxury retail.

 

Their habits are also changing.

 

"Affluent people of times gone by were more focused on status, on the larger environments where they would buy things," Karpin said. "Now they want unique experiences — they want to collect life experiences rather than things themselves."

 

Visa's transaction data appears to bear this out. Spending at quick-service restaurants climbed 44 per cent, according to figures cited in the interview, while grocery and food spending rose 27 per cent — both comfortably ahead of the broader travel-spend growth rate of around 10 per cent. 

 

Cross-border spending by cardholders from Thailand's top source markets, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and France, is growing at a double-digit pace in the mid-teens, Karpin added. Visa expects the affluent households in Asia Pacific to grow by 8 per cent annually through to 2030 and beyond.
 

 

 

 

A programme built on partnership

The comments came as Visa formally introduced Visa Destinations to Thailand, delivered in partnership with the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) and positioning the country as the first market in Asia Pacific — and the first anywhere — to receive a full country-level rollout of the global programme. 

 

According to Visa, it spans key destinations including Bangkok, Phuket, Chiang Mai, Pattaya, Udon Thani, Koh Samui, Hua Hin and Hat Yai.

 

 

 

 

Karpin pointed to Bangkok's Song Wat district, a historic riverside neighbourhood known for its heritage architecture and food scene, as an early illustration of how the programme works in practice. 

 

"We've got a Song Wat neighbourhood experience... you'll see Visa everywhere there at the moment," he said, noting that around 50 additional local merchants in the area have recently begun accepting Visa. "Those people who are travelling from all over the world will know that they can come to Song Wat and then pay with Visa and get special deals. The merchant will get different customers than they used to get before."

 

He pointed to a similar dynamic in South Korea, where the beauty retailer Olive Young began accepting Visa on its e-commerce platform. During a one-week international sales promotion, Karpin said, sales to overseas customers rose 200 per cent, an outcome he attributed to travellers wanting to "stay connected with the country" after they returned home.

 

 

 

Payments as the connective tissue

Underpinning the experiential push, Visa executives argue, is the unglamorous but essential work of payments infrastructure. Visa says it has more than 12 billion credentials in circulation worldwide which are accepted at 175 million merchants globally. 

 

In Thailand, one focus has been interoperability: Visa cards can now be loaded into the TrueMoney e-wallet and used to scan and pay via Thailand's PromptPay QR network, allowing overseas visitors to pay the way locals do.

 

"Security is very important," Karpin said, noting that transactions are continually screened for risk and that cardholders are protected against unauthorised charges. "Tourism is a very important area for that, because people go somewhere they're not familiar with. By definition, they need trust, they need acceptance, they need recognition."
 

 

Under the Visa Destinations umbrella, cardholders will also be able to access curated offers before and during their trip — from airport fast-track lanes and discounted ride-hailing to dining and retail perks. The programme is also being rolled out to other Asia Pacific markets and globally, meaning Thai cardholders travelling abroad should, in time, gain access to equivalent offers overseas.

 

 

 

 

Why it matters for Thailand

For Thailand, where tourism is a pillar of the economy, the pitch is straightforward: encourage the visitors who are already coming to spend more, stay longer and venture beyond the well-trodden circuit of Bangkok, Phuket and Chiang Mai into smaller neighbourhoods and provincial towns.

 

Visa's own figures suggest this is already happening, with travellers increasingly seeking out boutique accommodation and neighbourhood dining rather than sticking solely to established landmarks.

 

Whether Visa Destinations moves the needle on Thailand's broader tourism ambitions will likely be judged over the coming years, as the programme expands beyond its initial eight destinations. For now, both Visa and the TAT are framing the partnership as a long-term bet on value over volume – one aimed at ensuring that Thailand's next wave of tourism growth is measured not just in arrivals but in the depth of the experience visitors take home with them.