Originally Posted by
bostonbali
I believe savvy travellers can (almost) always find a workaround - be it working with airines on getting on their airlift list (as I succesfully did), or just not believing the hype of the protests (which didn't amount to much, despite the fact that 2 people did unfortunately pass away).
Like I said, I was there both in Nov 08 and April 09, and I can't wait to go back!
You will be going back as will I (in September), and I still encourage acquaintances to visit Thailand, but most tourists are NOT that "savvy" about about air travel when things go wrong, and they don't think (understandably) that they should have to be when they're on holiday. The closing of BKK for more than a week was major league fubar, and televised images of a mob invading a resort hotel or of Thai shooting at each other in the streets of Bangkok didn't help the Thai tourism industry any. It also doesn't help that the underlying problems of the PAD-UDD conflict are totally unresolved.