Bangkok was named the world's most visited city for 2025 by Euromonitor International, drawing an estimated 30.3 million international arrivals, ahead of Hong Kong, London, Macao, and Istanbul. Thailand expects that number to climb further in 2026, with 34.9 million foreign visitors forecast and tourism revenue projected at 1.63 trillion baht, an 8 percent increase year on year. By any conventional measure, this is success, the kind of ranking tourism boards spend years chasing. What it does not measure is whether the city living underneath all those visitor numbers actually feels good about hosting them.
Asia Pacific as a region is experiencing an extraordinary travel boom, with international arrivals up 10 percent year on year, and the surge has come with a parallel rise in visitors behaving in ways that strain the destinations absorbing them. One travel analyst's framing of the problem, that the genie is out of the bottle and nobody quite knows how to put it back in, captures the position Bangkok finds itself in: the marketing worked, arguably too well, and now the city has to manage the consequences of being everyone's first choice rather than simply celebrate the title.
The complaints are not new, but their scale is. Temples treated as photo backdrops rather than active places of worship, dress codes ignored at sites where locals still come to pray, the kind of casual disregard for context that turns a sacred space into a content opportunity. The complaints from residents and officials cluster around two areas in particular: religious and cultural sites where visitor behaviour repeatedly fails to meet basic standards of respect, and the physical strain on infrastructure, with littering, waste mismanagement, and pollution along canals and public markets degrading the very environments tourists came to see in the first place. Traffic, already a defining feature of Bangkok life, absorbs an additional, constant layer of tour buses and transport vehicles that locals did not sign up for and cannot route around.
