The thing is, what places like Thailand and Vietnam don't realise is that you can't have it both ways or have our cake an eat it. You either do the normal accept everyone MO and make a shed-load of incoming money but deal with all the moronic issues, or you change completely and offer a really top class experience like Singapor/Maldives etc. with a price to match, so that the idiots can't afford and go elsewhere. But that too has it's issues. Problem is, that there is a transition period where you errect the barriers to the morons and have to accept a massive loss for a few years so that you can upgrade everything to the standard higher-quality tourist demand from the experience, so that the message gets out. I doubt very much most Thai business owners and workers are ready to swallow that. You would have to eliminate so many things/problems that higher-spending and quality tourists won't accept plus want, as is now doesn't cut it... and that would be super painful/expensive and there would be a huge backlash from the tourist industry and the local Thai workers, which then becomes a political problem. This is everything from infrastucture to scams to law enforcement to perceptions of safety and on and on. There is so much more to this than meets the eye or people/officials realise and you can't just wave a wand, Harry Potter style, and ta-da it's fixed. Reputations are hard and expensive to change/fix... take a long time.
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