Lessons learned from previous travel subsidy schemes that cost the government 2.3 billion baht due to fraud have the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) defending the complicated registration process for the latest programme.
The agency has been working on fixing problems that led to crashes on the first day of registrations on Tuesday. As of Wednesday evening, it was still deciding whether it would have to suspend registrations, in which case it would inform the public, said TAT governor Thapanee Kiatphaibool.
The TAT has also pledged to regulate appropriate room prices and guard against overcharging by hoteliers during the low-season domestic travel promotion period.
The agency apologised on Wednesday for glitches in registrations for the 1.76-billion-baht co-payment scheme, which subsidises hotel rooms for domestic tourists, offering 500,000 room nights in total.
Ms Thapanee said the agency had changed from using the Pao Tang application managed by Krungthai Bank in the previous scheme to its own app — Amazing Thailand — to establish data ownership and tighten security checks through verification on the state-owned ThaID app.
She said the two apps could help enhance security, allowing the TAT to assure the public that registrants’ personal data is protected according to national standards.
According to the TAT, the new system was developed by Raventure Co, which was established in 2023. The company said its executives had experience in developing government apps, including the Mor Prom vaccination information service during the pandemic.
Ms Thapanee said the registration process, which has been heavily criticised for its complexity, is needed to avoid large losses from fraud, as occurred in the past four phases of the “We Travel Together” scheme.
Since the subsidy programme was first launched during the pandemic, a total of 1,489 fraud complaints have been filed in connection with bogus bookings to claim subsidies.
Of the total, 1,411 are still under investigation and only 38 have been concluded. The unresolved fraud cases caused roughly 2.34 billion baht in damage.
Ms Thapanee said the major bottleneck has been access to the ThaID app, which can accommodate only 100 visitors per second.
To eliminate these obstacles, the developer has bypassed the process with ThaID at the beginning. Instead, tourists will be required to verify their identity via ThaID during check-in later, she said.
The agency is also upgrading its main website and has put the list of hotel and tourism products on the front page to let unregistered users search for hotels before they enrol in the scheme.
Responding to complaints from users unable to obtain a one-time password (OTP) for email verification, mostly Gmail users, she said the large amount of OTP submissions at one time made Google classify them as spam.
These technical hurdles were partially resolved, and the TAT assured tourists the system should run smoothly within a week.
In terms of concerns about overpriced hotel rooms in the scheme, Ms Thapanee said prices should not exceed 10% above last year’s low-season rate.
If any hotel is found to be selling overpriced rooms, the TAT has the right to blacklist the operators from the system, she said.
However, as hoteliers sought to use dynamic pricing for the co-payment system, Ms Thapanee said hotels should adopt only two fixed rates: weekdays and weekends plus holidays.
Many users have been unable to register for the tourism subsidy scheme since it opened to the public on July 1. Molpasorn Shoowong
