柬埔寨前五月国际游客锐减47.8% 陆路口岸关闭成主因

[来源: CIR] [分类提示: NEWS] 标题: Opinion: Every Neighbour’s Tourism Grew This Year. Cambodia’s Fell by Half. Arnoud Darc The border explains the shock. It does not explain why we keep measuring the wrong thing. In the first five months of 2026, every one of Cambodia’s neighbours saw international tourism hold steady or grow. Vietnam set a record, up 14.9 percent. Thailand was almost flat, down 2.3 percent. Laos, in the first quarter, grew 8 percent. Cambodia stood alone: international arrivals fell 47.8 percent, to 1.54 million, according to the Ministry of Tourism’s own monthly reports. That is not a rounding error. It is the steepest decline in the region, and it deserves an honest conversation rather than a reassuring one. The proximate cause is no secret. The closure of the land border with Thailand removed, almost overnight, Cambodia’s single largest source of arrivals. Thai arrivals fell 96.2 percent; Lao arrivals, also mostly overland, fell 91.4 percent. Land crossings, which only a year earlier had carried more visitors than air, collapsed by more than two-thirds. When you lose your biggest channel, the headline falls hard. But the border is the shock, not the underlying story — and the underlying story is one we have been avoiding for years. Cambodia’s celebrated tourism “recovery” was, to a large degree, a statistical illusion. The 6.7 million arrivals reported in 2024 — narrowly above 2019 — rested on a near-doubling of land-border crossings. The part of tourism that actually builds an economy