Ultsch Consult Insights — Hospitality / Guest Market Intelligence

What European Hotels Still Get Wrong About Thai and Vietnamese Guests

Booking channels, trip structure and trust signals look different from the source-market side. Most European properties are still building for a guest who doesn’t exist.

Europe absorbs roughly half to two-thirds of all long-haul travel booked out of Thailand. Vietnam’s outbound numbers grew by more than half in a single year. Yet a lot of European hotels still plan their outreach to Thai and Vietnamese guests around the wrong profile. That profile — impulsive, group-bound, OTA-first — barely exists.

The Travel Agent Isn’t a Middleman Here — It’s the Product

In Thailand, self-organized travel is now the clear preference. TGM Research’s 2025 national study puts independent trip planning at around four in ten travelers. Roughly one in ten still go through a travel agency or platform. That’s a real, current shift — not a stereotype from a decade ago.

But that shift doesn’t erase travel agents. It concentrates them where trips get complex: multi-country routes, customized itineraries. These build the actual long-haul holiday to Europe, even as online travel agencies dominate simple accommodation bookings. Expedia, Booking.com and Agoda lead that simpler market.

That split has a real commercial cost. A hotel that only manages its OTA listings stays invisible to a large share of Thai FIT travelers. An agent in Bangkok assembled their entire multi-country trip — flights, hotels, ground transport. Nobody in Europe heard from the guest until much later.

Vietnam adds a second layer. Vietnamese travelers need a Schengen visa before they can even book. That process takes time, so agencies lock in outbound bookings around a month ahead of departure — enough runway for approval.

A European hotel used to short-lead-time domestic bookings needs to adjust. Vietnamese partner agencies confirm and adjust allotments on a completely different calendar.

FIT Doesn’t Mean Unplanned

Most long-haul travel out of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore to Europe is FIT — free independent travel. It is not the coach-tour group that the term “Asian tourist” still conjures in a lot of European hospitality planning.

Classic group travel exists too, but it stays narrow: MICE, student exchange programs, sports trips built around golf, tennis or a football tournament. That is a smaller, more predictable logistics problem than the actual majority segment.

That majority segment looks different. Two to four travelers, often spanning generations, share one long-haul trip lasting ten to twenty-one days, moving through several European countries. They plan it, sequence it, and pre-book much of it in detail — just not through a tour operator’s coach schedule.

The mismatch shows up in small operational choices. Hotels often build their Southeast Asia readiness around bigger breakfast buffets and a group check-in counter. That solves for the smaller MICE or sports-travel segment.

The larger FIT family moving through three countries in sixteen days needs something else. They need flexible room configurations for multi-generational travel and realistic luggage storage for a longer itinerary. And they need front-desk staff who can find a booking that arrived through an agent’s allotment, not the property’s own reservation system.

How Thai and Vietnamese Guests Decide Where to Trust a Hotel

Across the region, personal recommendation still outweighs paid content in shaping where people actually go. Klook’s regional survey found that 62 percent of Asia-Pacific travelers plan trips based on posts from ordinary travelers. Celebrities and brand accounts matter far less.

For Thai visitors, a sizeable diaspora reinforces this further. Close to 900,000 Thai citizens live abroad, nearly a third of them in Europe — concentrated in Sweden, the United Kingdom and Germany.

Thai and Singaporean visitors to Europe travel to see friends and relatives more often than Malaysian or Indonesian visitors do. That diaspora network works as an informal, ongoing recommendation engine. It reaches specific hotels and regions long before any marketing budget plays a role.

In practice, reputation compounds through channels a paid social campaign doesn’t reach. Return guests, diaspora word-of-mouth, and agents who rebook the same operator every season all carry more weight. Last year’s group got what the hotel promised, and that’s what brings them back.

A generic English-language ad aimed at “Southeast Asia” competes with something no marketing budget can easily buy.

Vietnam Is Moving Faster Than Most Playbooks Assume

Vietnam’s outbound market is growing at a pace that outdates a lot of standard assumptions. Outbound trips reached roughly 4.1 million in the first half of 2025, up 53.9 percent year-on-year.

Detailed official figures on travel to Europe specifically haven’t caught up with that volume yet. European hotels are often working from regional proxy data instead — Thailand, Japan, South Korea — rather than hard Vietnam-to-Europe numbers.

Vietnamese travel preferences are shifting in the same direction as Thailand’s. Decision Lab, YouGov’s research partner in Vietnam, found that 57 percent of Vietnamese travelers now prefer organizing trips independently. Only 27 percent still prefer a full package tour, and 16 percent mix the two.

A European hotel still budgeting for a forty-seat Vietnamese group is planning for a shrinking segment. The traveler who’s replacing that group spends more. They expect hotels to treat them as an individual guest, not a line on a manifest.

None of this makes Thai and Vietnamese travelers a difficult market to serve. It makes them a market that rewards what European hospitality already claims to be good at. That means relationships with the trade, flexible room configurations, a guest experience worth talking about. It just rewards those things through a different set of channels than the ones most Southeast Asia strategies use today.

Sources

• European Travel Commission / Market Vision Research and Consulting Services (2019): Study on the South-East Asian Outbound Travel Market with a Focus on Europe
• TGM Research (2025): Thailand Travel Insights 2025
• Decision Lab (2026): The rise of independent travel in Vietnam
• Vietnam General Statistics Office data, via VOV (2025): Vietnamese travellers eager to explore world as outbound tourism surges
• Vietnam Travel-Focused Omnibus Survey, via Transworld Representation Services (2025): Analysis of Outbound Travel Trends Among Vietnamese Tourists in 2025
• Klook regional survey, via Vietnam News: ‘Việt Nam is calling’: Social media videos give boost to Vietnamese tourism