The good news about Thailand reached the world. The travellers' questions are still unanswered

Lin (a fictional character) is planning to bring her parents to Bangkok over Chinese New Year. On Weibo she reads that Thailand has legalised cannabis. The report is flat, neither cheering nor condemning. But under the post, people keep asking the same thing: what if a street-side noodle soup has cannabis in it and I don't know? Will I be in trouble when I get home? Nobody answers. She closes the app and starts looking at flights somewhere else.

For agencies responsible for a country's image or its tourism, this raises a question: what do we measure the success of communicating with the world by? The amount of coverage, its tone, or what the audience decides after reading?

Visitors have not fully come back

The question matters because tourism has not fully recovered. Bank of Thailand figures show international arrivals fell from 39.8 million in 2019 to just 0.43 million in 2021, recovered to 35.55 million in 2024, then dropped to 32.97 million in 2025 [1].

And Chinese visitors remain a large group. In the third quarter of 2023, the latest country breakdown on Statista, 1.05 million came from China, second only to Malaysia [2]. What Chinese-language readers think about Thailand is not a distant concern.

On YouTube the world saw Thailand positively, but from one side only

A team led by Dr Muhammad Ibtesam Mazahir, Assoc. Prof. Dr Smith Boonchutima and colleagues (published in 2025) analysed 57 YouTube clips, both news and vlogs, posted in the three months either side of legalisation on 9 June 2022. The overall tone was positive in 43 clips, or 75.4%, and negative in only 7.0%.

That favourable picture comes with two warnings. First, the attention came and went quickly: 81% of the clips appeared after the announcement, clustered in June, falling to just 2 clips by September. Second, many clips carried a single voice. 28.1% quoted no second speaker at all, and very few warned travellers about the law when returning to their own countries, the information this audience needed most.

In Chinese media the coverage was neutral, but readers did not stay neutral

A second study by Deng, Assoc. Prof. Dr Pavel Slutskiy and Assoc. Prof. Dr Smith Boonchutima (published in 2023) read 128 Weibo posts by four Chinese-language outlets from 2019 to 2022. The three coders classified 82.8–94.5% of posts as neutral reporting, and only 0.8–2.3% as encouraging. The comments went the other way. A prominent cluster rejected Thailand as a destination, reasoning that they might eat cannabis-laced food without knowing, that oversight could not be trusted, and that the policy imitated the West.

The sources are worth a second look. 58.6% of posts cited Thai media and 7.8% were compiled by the outlets themselves, but 33.6% gave no source at all.

This says that what Thai agencies put out has a good chance of being retold in another language. Clear messages that answer real questions and can be cited are more likely to reach foreign readers than we might assume. Conversely, if the message does not answer the traveller's question, the gap gets filled with worry.

Three things to do before announcing a policy the world will notice

1. 1

   Answer the traveller's everyday questions

   Beyond announcing what the policy is, prepare short answers to the questions people will actually ask, such as how to tell whether food contains the ingredient and what to watch out for on returning home, translated into the languages of the main visitor markets.

2. 2

   Read the comments, not just the coverage

   The share of neutral or positive coverage does not tell you how readers feel. Follow reader comments in key markets, because that is where meaning gets settled.

3. 3

   Plan for after the spike

   Foreign media attention clustered in the first month and then vanished. Information that helps people decide whether to travel should stay findable over time, not live only in announcement-day news.

Reading this evidence with care

The YouTube study covers only 57 clips from one platform over six months, so it is a snapshot, not a picture of all media. The Chinese-media study had to be confined to Weibo because censorship makes some terms unsearchable, so the data are incomplete, visible comments may not be everyone's real opinion, and the study did not measure whether those comments actually reduced travel. Both studies collected data before the direction of Thailand's cannabis policy shifted again. The Statista visitor figures are included to show the size of the market; they do not show that media coverage or cannabis policy raised or lowered visitor numbers, and the country breakdown covers a single quarter.

A good image is one that answers questions

Good news reaches the world fast. What makes people actually come is an answer to the small questions they worry about. Agencies that communicate with the world should measure success by the questions they answer, not by the volume of coverage.

If your organisation is planning how to communicate a policy or the country's image to foreign audiences, the Center of Excellence in Communication Innovation at Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Communication Arts would be glad to talk and share what we have learned.