Just three charts can give us an overview of how Thailand’s international air capacity is faring in summer 2025. During OAG’s June webinar, we noted that the China to Thailand market in summer 2025 was still significantly behind 2019, by 44%, and 20% below last summer. Given that China is Thailand’s biggest international market, this appears to be bad news, so let’s take a look.

The first chart shows that in summer 2019:

• China was by far the largest international market for Thailand, with 7.4 million seats
• Japan was the second-largest with 2.3 million seats
• Hong Kong was third, with 1.9 million seats

None of these three markets has yet returned to summer 2019 (pre-pandemic) levels.

The data behind the chart tells us that this summer, there are just 4.1 million seats from China to Thailand, meaning that while it’s still the largest market, it remains considerably behind previous heights. This represents a reduction since last summer, down from 5.1 million, suggesting Chinese travellers are opting to go elsewhere this year.

The second chart in our short overview highlights the percentage change in capacity for each of Thailand’s Top 10 international markets, and the overall position. We can see that China, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea are all experiencing reduced capacity to Thailand, both compared to summer 2019 and summer 2024, suggesting that demand for travel to and from these destinations is moving elsewhere.

For some other top country markets, there is year-on-year growth this summer, notably Japan (+7%) and Vietnam (+21%). However, both of these countries still have less capacity than in summer 2019; for Japan, seats are 27% behind summer 2019 and Vietnam, 4% behind.

So how is Thailand responding? In the final chart, we look at whether the gap in capacity from China is being filled. Whilst China - Thailand capacity represents a drop of just over 1m seats, we can see that growth in other international markets is actually more than compensating for this reduction.

There is strong capacity growth this summer from India, Vietnam, the UAE and across a range of other smaller markets, resulting in a net increase overall in Thailand’s international capacity of 0.4 million seats.

For the India - Thailand market, a combination of factors is driving growth: 

• Thailand’s visa-free policy for Indian tourists,
• a growing Indian middle class boosted by strong economic growth,
• and increased promotional activity as part of the 2025 ASEAN-India Year of Tourism.

So in this case, the headline 'China to Thailand capacity reduction' potentially masks the real story, which is growth is still happening, just in different ways and from different markets.