The rich are very different from you and the TAT

“Amazing Luxury Thailand: Where Life Rules Everything” evidently aims to convince the wealthy to get in their private jets and discover the “unseen” bits of the Kingdom that basically only they can afford. 

The authority posted the three-minute ad on YouTube on November 13 (youtu.be/Q_4zbv2v2XA) and promptly received its first viewer comment: “Disgusting”. The second one was “F***ing disgusting”, only without the asterisks. It’s safe to assume these remarks did not come from rich people.

The media, both on and offline, carried the ball from there. City guide BK.Asia-City.com was among the sources indicating they were less than impressed. 

The video opens with an odd pair of couples, one Asian and the other farang, travelling together around Thailand. The men are dressed in James Bond tuxedos and their companions wear chic cocktail dresses. “It’s not the length of life,” says the voiceover, “but the depth of life.” Or, as cynics would prefer, it’s not the length of your stay, but the depth of your pockets.

This is “Thailand the spin-off”, a sequel to the cheap-and-fun destination enjoyed by smelly backpackers and “The Hangover” barf brigade.

Recently Ian Andrew McCulloch, an Englishman, became the Kingdom’s 25-millionth visitor. We’re not sure what category he fits into but, with those numbers, it’s time to start pulling in the wealthy and the well behaved.

Of course most of the tourists these days are Chinese. Unfortunately most of the incoming money is not Chinese yuan, because they tend to be, shall we say, parsimonious. They book serviced apartments en masse and buy street food or groceries to cook themselves. The Western backpackers are “baht-packers”, unwilling to part with dollars or euros except to have their hair corn-rowed and perhaps a fresh tattoo added.

Enough with these “low-rent” tourists! Let’s see some rich folks in tuxedos! This is understandable thinking on the part of the government, which gets most of its money from tourism and needs way more (money). 

This new promotional commercial, though, sends out the wrong message. The fabulous four depicted are more spoiled millionaire brats than the sort of kindly, caring, benevolent types we want to see. The video’s director seems to have been inspired by the movie “The Talented Mr Ripley”, about rich, young Americans travelling, partying and murdering people on the Mediterranean coast. 

The two couples in the video arrive by private jet and hop into a private tuk-tuk waiting right there on the tarmac. Once a few glasses of bubbly chase off the jet lag, they’re in a stretch limousine hunting for roasted chestnuts in Bangkok’s Chinatown.

Next they’re on foldable bicycles zooming around the Grand Palace, illuminated by night, and bouncing around the Thai outback in a 4x4, and riding rough on a bamboo raft. The farang dude sparks up a cigar to celebrate scaling the cliff above Ao Nang Beach in Krabi. In Chiang Rai he boards an elephant, pipe firmly gripped in teeth. What a man!

None of these things have ever actually happened to anyone we know. We do, however, recall a quite wealthy French visitor falling into a Bangkok sewer when he stepped off the curb to enter a taxi.