Myanmar Tourism Gets a Second Chance: Is It Ready for It?
Skift Take
Ethical tourism made Myanmar a lost tourism frontier in Southeast Asia. But people are forgetting the genocide, giving the destination another crack.
A second wave of tourism is emerging for Myanmar as international attention on its acts of genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority wanes.
A tsunami of other issues — coronavirus, Brexit, Trump’s impeachment, wildfires in Australia, trade war, climate change — has instead preoccupied the world. Last month’s International Court of Justice ruling on the genocide, though deemed too lenient by commentators in the Asian media generally, has also provided some closure, according to Myanmar tourism players.
Southeast Asia’s second largest country has proven that ethical tourism is a reality and that tourists, particularly Western, don’t need courts in The Hague to mete out rulings. They scuppered Myanmar’s aim to achieve 7.5 million arrivals and revenues of $10.2 billion this year, by refusing to visit in 2018/2019 after thousands of Rohingyas fled the Rakhine state from August 2017 to escape the military’s ethnic cleansing.
In 2018, in the latest available data
