Cambodia will be able to make money if it can attract more Chinese tourists to visit Cambodia, as Cambodian and Chinese leaders have declared 2025 as the Cambodia-China Tourism Year.
Cambodia has set a target of attracting 7.5 million foreign tourists by 2025, including 1.1 million Chinese. But in the region, Cambodia has to compete, especially with Vietnam and Thailand, in winning over Chinese tourists. So we need to find effective ways to compete with these countries.
Chinese President Xi Jinping came to Cambodia after the New Year and agreed to designate 2025 as the Cambodia-China Tourism Year. So it is also a potential for us to increase the attraction of Chinese tourists to Cambodia directly, although not like Vietnam and Thailand, but it should be a little more than before. If we can win over as many Chinese as possible, we will be able to make more money from tourism, and Cambodians will benefit from this sector.
Up until now, the resources and potential of Cambodia’s tourism sector are really not comparable to Thailand and Vietnam, our neighbors to the west and east, but we should not fail to try to strengthen and prepare ourselves to be an independent tourism market.
In fact, Cambodia’s tourism sector still relies heavily on entry from Vietnam and Thailand, and a large number of people come to Cambodia after visiting Thailand or Vietnam. The reason is that we have a somewhat narrow entry and exit point. Until now, the gateway to Cambodia for many destinations is still through neighboring countries, whether from Europe, America, Australia, or even Japan. Therefore, most tourists come to Thailand or Vietnam and then continue their stay in Cambodia.
For tour packages from Europe and America, that’s how it is, but for tour packages with China, we think it’s a gateway that we can do ourselves because now we have direct flights with many Chinese destinations, even the capital Beijing. The Chinese giant also has direct flights to Cambodia. In addition, there are flights to Guangzhou, Quang Minh and many other destinations.
For China, we no longer need to connect flights with Thailand or Vietnam or other countries like before, we just go to China directly. So we really have independence in making our own tourism packages. In the first quarter of 2025, Vietnam overtook Thailand in attracting Chinese tourists to its country.
The Bangkok Post reported that in the first quarter of 2025, Vietnam attracted 1.5 million Chinese tourists, an increase of 178 percent, while Thailand only attracted 1.3 million. While Vietnam had an advantage in the previous quarter, Thailand is currently preparing various policies to increase its attractiveness to Chinese tourists.
For Cambodia, the quarterly figures are not yet known, but in just two months, namely January to February 2025, the number of Chinese tourists was only nearly 200,000, with an increase of nearly 68 percent. And if we talk about the figure for one year, especially in 2024, it did not reach the million mark like Thailand and Vietnam, namely only over 840,000.
Seeing such statistics, don’t hesitate to make efforts. In the case that we are a small country with a small population, but we can create innovative programs or tourism packages for China, we also have many advantages. This tourism thing is not important whether it is small or big, it is important that we know how to make tourists happy, eat deliciously, have reasonable prices, be safe, and sleep comfortably, and they will come to visit our country.
In short, even though we are small, please don’t think that we are small. We should study and find what is superior, what is the strong point, highlight and strengthen the promotion. We will definitely be able to do it.
