somtam2000
admin
mahout
Posts: 2913

Located in:
Indonesia

#1 Posted: 10/10/2008 - 16:39


You'd need to be living under a stone ... or on a blissfully disconnected southeast Asian island ... not to be aware of the financial meltdown that's currently underway.

So an open question to those planning a trip in the near future -- has the market meltdown affected your plans?

Depending on your home currency, you could be doing pretty well out of this, but if you call Australia home for example, your holiday to Thailand just got 30% more expensive as this currency chart illustrates: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AUDTHB=X

daflj
backpacker
Posts: 16

#2 Posted: 10/10/2008 - 17:12


It's not really made any difference to me and my partner. I'm not sure whether we'll be getting more currency for our £s but the tickets were paid for some time ago so there's no stopping us now.

jimsparadise
motodop
Posts: 30

#3 Posted: 10/10/2008 - 19:49


I've traveled 3 straight years for 3 months each time and planned to continue that routine until I just moved there. Unfortunately, the combination of high flight prices and market conditions will probably keep me home working this year. Currency conditions have slightly improved for the Dollar since my trip this last winter. Simply, when you're trying to retire or at least semi-retire, losing even 20% of your savings or net worth has a dire effect on travel. From the Thai perspective--look out---between the political problems in the country, which hardly ever affects tourists, but can harm tourism, and this massive loss of funds worldwide---tourism is going to suffer heavily.

swag
hippy
Posts: 75

Located in:
Australia

#4 Posted: 11/10/2008 - 05:37


My wife and I travel to s.e. asia for 1 month each year. Next feb we will be travelling to Thailand and Cambodia. We would generally use some domestic flights as we could afford it and to save some time. Yesetrday I got a quote to fly 3 sectors using the Bangkok Airways discovey pass coupon system. Two months ago I priced this at about $700 aud all up.This has now risen to just over $1000 aud on the current conversion rate.While this won't stop us travelling we will probably travel by bus BKK-Trat and bus PP-Siem Reap to save some cash.All up this it pretty worrying times for the tourist revenues of these countries and political instabilities will only further put doubt in the minds of first time travellers to the region.

SBE
tuk tuk driver
Posts: 199

#5 Posted: 12/10/2008 - 03:27


I'm off to BKK tomorrow for my annual six month wander in SE Asia. Neither the political unrest in BKK nor the financial crisis have put me off going!

However I just looked at the exchange rates on this site http://www.xe.com/ucc/

Very strange discrepancies between the different currencies ... the Aussie $ and the Canadian $ were almost on a par with the US $ when I was in Thailand earlier this year (all about 33Baht/$) Now Canadian and Australian currencies are both down to about 22B whereas the US $ is over 34B/$. The UK pound seems very low too.

Stock markets are falling everywhere but I thought the huge economic mess in the US was what precipitated this crisis? How come the US dollar seems to be holding up so well in relation to other currencies?

exacto
som tam seller
Posts: 701

#6 Posted: 12/10/2008 - 09:10


I wonder the same thing as SBE. If the meltdown in the US precipitated the crisis, why is the US dollar appreciating relative to other curriencies? Any econ majors out there wish to comment?

Will look forward to hearing updates and insights from SBE over the next six months. I'd particularly like to hear how you are handling visa issues given the tighter enforcement of the 30 day/onward flight rules by Thai Immigration. Have a great trip.