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When talking about tourist attractions in Thailand, apart from beautiful natural attractions such as seas, mountains, or night markets, another important thing that drives Thai tourism for more than 10 years and continues to increase is faith tourism where tourists go to pray in respect to many famous places. This time, ACU PAY will take you to delve into the reason why muteluh tourism has become a secret weapon in Thai tourism.
It can’t be denied that beliefs and faith have always been with Thais for a long time, from opening your eyes in the morning till going to bed, whether auspicious shirt colors, auspicious timing, auspicious phone numbers, paying homage to sacred things, amulets, or fortune telling. These faith and spiritual anchors are the origin of the word ‘Meteluh’ (witchcrafts)
With the faith power of people who try to seek places that are ‘sacred’ and make those places become tourist attractions that draw people with faith and beliefs to visit. This trend does not only happen among Thais but also foreigners, especially Chinese tourists. Muteluh tourism is likely to grow by leaps and bounds and generate great income to the Thai economy from both paying homage to sacred things or renting amulets.
Faith-based tourism and Belief-Based Tourism gain a lot of attention from people all around the world, especially tourists from these 5 countries who often travel to Thailand and do Belief-based tourism the most, which are people from China, Singapore, Malaysia, Hongkong, and India.
According to Future Market Insight 2023, faith-based tourism is likely to grow exponentially. It is expected to triple the global economic value within 10 years from USD 13.7 billion in 2022 and is expected to increase to USD 40.9 billion in 2033.
Recently, TAT, The Tourism Authority of Thailand, launched a series of activities to stimulate faith tourism to boost tourism throughout the region with faith and beliefs to bring more revenue to the country. It is expected that the tourism value of the Muteluh will increase due to the increasing frequency of travel and recovery of new places of belief. Therefore, it is expected that the tourism value of the Muteluh in 2023 will rise by not less than 10-20%, or around THB 15 billion.
It is interesting to think that faith and belief in sacred things do not disappear as times pass by but it is even more popular. Interestingly, teenagers and working-age people have become more interested in worshiping sacred things, as evidenced by the content about praying respect to Ganesha or Laksmi on various social media channels including TikTok and X (Twitter).
Dr. Suchada Patia, consultant, and developer of the organization, who works in positive psychology to develop the organization, said that the younger generation’s increasing respect for sacred things may be due to increased competition and stress in society so that they have to find things to be spiritual anchors. If one’s own mind isn’t strong enough, turning to gods or sacred things is like looking for a positive source of energy to fulfill oneself, which is human nature.
In addition, human worship of the thing that can’t be seen may be like driving what we are thinking and wanting to be successful. For example, worshiping Ganesha reflects the hope of success. The new generation wants to create hope and energy for themselves, so they turn to respect sacred things more.
