🇱🇦 Laos' troubled tourism industry

Hello friends!

Another fantastic one here from our friend in Laos. Today our correspondent checks in with how a friend in the tourism industry is getting along, and what he can tell us about the sector more broadly.

It’s been a dream of mine to visit Laos for years — I want to see all those dang jars! — and I’ll be one of the first when borders reopen. Hopefully, I won’t be the only one.

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See you next week when we check in on Indonesia’s elections.Erin Cook

Chickens. I asked him the backup plan, and my man said chickens.

It’s a breezy, cool morning and we’re having a slow coffee on the Mekong. This is the most temperate time of year in Laos, the traditional high season for tourism. Nyim’s an old friend — a tour guide by trade, specialising in eco-tourism in local villages and nature reserves.

These days he’s got nothing but time.

“Last month, I had one tour,” he says with a laugh. Nyim is a short, stout fellow in his mid-30s. He unfailingly wears a boyish, disarming grin, even as he talks me through all the ways COVID has roundhouse-kicked his business this year. With characteristic Laoness he delivers the worst bits with a little, resigned chuckle. (Nyim, not his real name, means “smile.”)

“COVID shut everything.” Chuckle. “My business is half-dead.” Chuckle.

He’s got backup plans. It may include chickens.

Nyim isn’t the only one with time on his hands.

Before COVID, Laos’ tourism industry was rippling, closing in on $1 billion in gross annual receipts. That number would have been a symbolic feat, placing it among the largest drivers of a Lao economy heavily dependent on energy and mining.

And the growth was visible. You saw the boom in guesthouses, resorts, restaurants and other tourism-adjacent businesses. There were important subtleties, too. Most of the workers were in their 20s; a slight majority were women. Many were sweet country kids, wiring their paychecks back to families in the countryside.

Then came COVID and the new world of closed borders. At first, it seemed a brief hiatus. Then it started to sink in, that this may be the state of things for a while, and then came the layoffs. One survey said about half of tourism businesses have gone into hibernation, their doors shut, their phone numbers disconnected. The workforce has shrunk by almost 40 percent.

Their former employees are moving on, finding odd jobs in Laos, maybe looking for a way into Thailand. Some are moving home to help with the rice harvest. Anything to be of use.

Nyim got into the hospitality business ten years ago, working the night shift as a receptionist at a hotel in Luang Prabang. He dreamed of becoming a tour guide. First step: Learn English. “I had two words that I practiced: good night and good morning,” he said.

He got promoted to the day shift, his English improved, and soon he was a tour guide, taking bum-bagged foreigners to Phou Si Mountain and Kuangsi Waterfall. After five years of this, he moved to a different town and started his own tour company. That was 2018.

Doing business isn’t easy in Laos. There’s a blizzard of paperwork and permissions and rules. The only shortcut is cold hard cash. Nyim had something else: a winning personality. He’d come grinning into a village chief’s office and charm him, and all the locals and officials, into helping him create a tour there.

Slowly he built a healthy business out of local bike tours, forest treks and village homestays. He hired two guides and between the three of them, there was regular work year-round. By this point, he was getting calls from travel agents abroad and prospective partners.

“And everything stopped,” he chuckled.

There was the month of lockdown in March. No business whatever. Then lockdown ended, but the borders stayed closed. His tour guides left. There was no bad blood, but they needed to make ends meet.

He hired his intern, knowing she needed a job and wanted to become a guide one day. They worked out a deal. He paid half her salary and sponsored her English lessons. By October he couldn’t afford even that. He and his wife found her another job.

As soon as there’s money, Nyim wants to hire everybody back. But he doesn’t expect that anytime soon, even with the recent news on vaccines. “I have 50 percent hope for things to recover,” he said, “but I also have 50 percent that I’ll look for something else to do.”

Hence the chickens.

Nyim’s got an empty piece of land on the outskirts of town. If things look ugly by next July, he’ll close his office in town and build a house there.

“At least I can raise some chickens for food, plant vegetables, farm, and help support me and my family until eventually there are customers,” he said. He imagines his one-year-old son chasing chickens, dashing between goats and cows.

He laughs. What can you do? It’s meant as a rhetorical question, but if you observe Lao folks you know they already know the answer. In good times and bad, it’s always an option to go back to the land.