The Worst Has, Once More, Passed Us By

The situation in our part of Ladprao remains the same today – there is no change in the nearby sois and the rain shower that occurred an hour or so ago did not stimulate any overflows. The msot recent high tide has passed (last night was Loy Krathong with its attendant full moon) and reports are that flood levels in most places are starting to decline. There is still a long way to go, of course, and many people have suffered because of the natural disaster.  Let us hope things now go as predicted and the waters recede so that we are back more or less to a normal way of life within a couple of weeks.

We have not heard of people breaking down dikes or barriers recently – have they stopped doing it, are they still doing it but no one is reporting it or was the damage actually caused by the fingers of the invisible hand?

The cost of the floods has been enormous, with more than 500 people now said to have been killed as a result.  Attention increasingly shifts to the need to rebuild the manufacturing sector and restoring tourism, investor confidence and so forth. It would be nice to think that, at this time of tragic emergency, all sectors of society will join together …..

Alas, no.

Disappointingly but as widely expected, bloodstained hypocrite Abhisit Vejjajiva is leading the attempt to try to undermine the democratically elected government in concert with an aacademic from Chulalongkorn University who is planning to sue on some strange basis – Chulalongkorn University also gave us the doctors who broke the Hippocratic Oath by refusing to treat police officers who had been wounded by the neo-fascist PAD thugs. Expect lengthy stories in the press about obscure claims of misconduct as the forces of reaction try to engineer another judicial coup. They have learned nothing.

Thai Spas and Lanna Cultural Products in the Hotel Tourism Business

Thai Spas and Lanna Cultural Products in the Hotel Tourism Business

Abstract

The equivalent of the knowledge-based economy in the tourism industry is the experience economy. This concept involves the use of additional value in a tourism setting-offering to differentiate the experience provided from any experience available elsewhere. It offers what appears to be, therefore, the experience of authenticity. A successful experience requires immersion into the created reality while, at the same time, maintaining international levels of service and comfort even when these would contradict the apparent authenticity. A hotel resort calls upon the services of a network of partners in seeking to assemble a full package of experiences for all of the senses, together with means of providing physical traces that shape the memories of those involved in the desired fashion. To some extent, it has been a partnership between public and private sector agencies that has made sense of this concept and made it into a model that can be followed by any hotelier wishing to participate. This effort has focused on the former Thai state of Lanna, based on its ancient capital of Chiang Mai, since this state has a rich and identifiable cultural tradition which may be employed for creating an authentic experience for customers. In this case study, the issues of public-private cooperation are examined in the context of the provision of a specific value-added tourism product aimed at providing a new generation of such products in an increasingly competitive environment and for a location that has suffered from lack of identity and focus.

Thanan Apivantanaporn and John Walsh

This abstract is the latest to be accepted for my forthcoming case study book on Technological Development and Workplace Change – the technology in this case relates to the extension of the knowledge embedded in a service product rather than any kind of machinery. Do, please, let me know if you would like to be included in this book – send your ideas to me at the usual address (jcwalsh@siu.ac.th).

Business Research Methods: Cultural Issues

Globalization brings about the integration of different markets involved in production and consumption and that means, for our purposes, different types of people are likely to become customers of a given good or service. When research is involved, therefore, it is increasingly likely that it will involve cross-cultural issues in one way or another.

Read the full article here.