Tourism Business Adaption to Survive the Coronavirus Disease-2019 Pandemic in Thailand

The tourism industry is a service sector playing a significant role in the Thai economy, accounting for 11 percent of the total revenue generated domestically before the coronavirus 2019 pandemic (COVID-19). Unfortunately, since some COVID-19 countermeasures like lockdowns and travel restrictions have drastically reduced the number of tourists, this revenue continuously diminishes. Consequently, many tourism-related businesses and activities could not survive through the circumstances. The present research aims to investigate the supporting and inhibiting factors of tourism business survival during the coronavirus pandemic, firstly, using the Cox proportional hazards model. Then, the Kaplan-Meier estimator is employed to estimate the businesses’ survival probability of individual significant parameter across survival periods. The results reveal that the survivability of a tourism-related establishment mainly depends on firm’s characteristics such as business type, location, fixed assets, and net income. Meanwhile, such business and employment strategies as social distancing practice, laying off part-time employees. and operating without working-hour reduction can ameliorate the business’s survivability. Furthermore, domestic-tourist targeting enterprises appear to contribute to high survivability similar to the exporting and importing components in their supply chain. Among various government financial relief measures, the reduction of contribution of employers to the Social Security Fund is found to be a supporting factor for business survivability. However, some debt-relieving measures worsen the probability of business survival. Lastly, the survival probability paths over the studied period from the Kaplan-Meier estimation show that any business adaptation including government support should be promptly employed within the first six months or at the latest within a year of this epidemic event to increase the survivability.