The pitch was made at an event to publicly reveal the ‘Travel Link’ platform held at the Royal Phuket City Hotel in Phuket Town yesterday (Feb 16).
Present for the occasion was Bhummikitti Ruktaengam, who proposed and championed the development of the platform during the height of the COVID-19 tourism shutdown while calling for Phuket to receive tourists through what later was called the ‘Sandbox’ policy.
A former President of the Phuket Tourist Association, Mr Bhummikitti now serves as advisory chairman of the association.
Also present was Assistant Professor Dr Chayanon Phucharoen, Deputy Dean for Research and Graduate Studies, Faculty of Hospitality and Tourism, Prince of Songkla University (PSU) Phuket campus, who has already made use of the platform to reveal statistically supported changes to Phuket’s tourism industry and the spending nature of tourists coming to Phuket.
Mr Bhummikitti has likewise used the information now made available through the Travel Link platform to make suggestions to policies affecting tourism at the national level.
“This system will provide more clear information. It will help to push and drive tourism,” Governor Narong said.
“The data management system is an integration between government agencies and the private sector. It is a simple system that provides data on the number of tourists, the number of rooms booked, and other statistics that will help serve the needs of tourists and operators,” he added.
“This information can be linked across all departments, and we will be able to see the income generated and make predictions of how it will spread throughout the island’s economy,” Governor Narong said.
“It is an obvious achievement that will result in widespread benefits, and it’s a good thing that this system started in Phuket as the first province of Thailand. We will also develop data platforms to include to Krabi and Phang Nga provinces, which will raise the level tourism services in the area to the international standards in the future,” he added.
Assoc Prof Dr Teeranee Ajalakul, Director of the Government Big Data Analysis and Management Institute (GBDI), noted that the platform, already comprehensive in the information provided, at this stage remains incomplete.
“The development of the system is almost finished. Only some more information remains to be added,” Dr Teeranee said.
“In Phuket, there will be a working group from all sectors involved in order to bring this system to be used in further work, and we expect that this system will be an important basic system for use by all parties,” he added.
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