Bangkok’s Chinatown morphing from ethnic enclave to hip tourist hotspot

The rapid transformation of Bangkok’s Chinatown is turning it from “a centre of Chinese immigrants in Thailand” to “one of the hippest areas in Bangkok”, C9 Hotelworks’ managing director Bill Barnett notes in a blog post.

A sign of the pace of change, Barnett observed that a few years ago, millennials still viewed Chinatown as an “ancestor’s area where elders meet up and have their Asian breakfast”. While the traditional food scene still exists, the average age of visitors has dropped substantially and visitors now are becoming bar or café hoppers.

It won’t be long before this transformation extends into tourism, with the boutique hotels, hostels, hip bars and cafes becoming increasingly prominent features of Chinatown.

Barnett wrote: “Based on our research and market interviews with hotels in the area, the number of tourists visiting Chinatown has sharply increased over the past few years. Thus, hoteliers in the area foresee that Chinatown will be reinvented over the next five years.”

The average daily rate (ADR) of boutique hotels in Chinatown ranges from 2,000 to 6,000 baht (US$62-187), with occupancy averaging over 75 per cent. But due to the constraints on development scale, hotel inventories for the existing hotels range from a handful up to 70 or 80 rooms.

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