Direct charter flights linking the Chinese cities of Yiwu and Wuxi with Udon Thani have provided a blueprint for developing secondary tourism gateways in Thailand.
Launched under the government’s Thailand Summer Blast initiative, which supports charter flights from international markets, the route was used by the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) to test a model for matching emerging provincial tourism products with overseas demand.
“When we looked at the data for supply and demand, we found that in new destinations like the Red Lotus Sea in Udon Thani, the number one foreign tourist group is the Chinese, because they love the beauty of the Red Lotus Sea,” said Pattaraanong Na Chiang Mai, deputy governor for international marketing, Asia and South Pacific, at TAT.
To support the initiative, TAT worked with local tourism stakeholders to prepare the destination for international visitors.
“We tried having discussions. The TAT office in China brought three to four tour agents to the TAT Udon Thani office to meet and talk. This included inviting local business operators from Udon Thani to discuss the possibilities. We also took them to survey the hotels, to meet and discuss with local tour agents,” Pattaraanong said.
She added that discussions with Udon Thani International Airport were also an important part of the process.
“There have been efforts to do this since late last year. But because there were issues regarding the aircraft that would land – it had to be a specific size, and more details on the technical side – the collaboration didn’t actually materialise until Songkran of this year.”
To maximise the economic benefits of the service, TAT and local authorities worked with the Bank of Thailand and commercial financial institutions to improve payment infrastructure around the Red Lotus Sea. Merchants were encouraged to adopt digital payment systems compatible with Chinese platforms such as Alipay and UnionPay.
“There was also preparation on the private sector’s part on how to handle the influx. As a result, the launch of these flights created a new working model. We saw that we can open direct routes from a second-tier city in China to a second-tier city here,” Pattaraanong said.
While the route demonstrated strong initial demand, services were suspended on June 11, 2026, due to rising operating costs.
“The first flight had a pretty good load capacity, at almost 90 per cent. But after operating for a while, the impact of jet fuel costs, which actually doubled, made the operational costs quite high,” she said.
Despite the suspension, Pattaraanong said TAT considers the project a successful test case for future aviation partnerships: “The demand is definitely still there, so there will likely be discussions to consider operating these flights again.”
