25/07/2026
I think most of you have seen this viral video and has become a backlash throughout social media already.
👉 Why has it become such a big deal in Thailand now?
: From my perspective, we, Thai people, have seen a lot of disrespectul and inappropriate behaviours from foreigners for quite a while already. Visitors looked down on Thai people, cultures and traditions by words and gestures.
: It's not just this BTS incident. The momentum has been accumulated and "sorry for bringing money to your country"...again...and those gestures including sexual gesture towards the woman... This is not a right mindset of someone who is traveling to another country.
: Thailand welcomes everyone with kindness and grateful hospitality. But our kindness and hospitality might have led visitors think that these are services, that they bring money for the services and they can do whatever they want.
This incident might have been pretty much the last straw.
🍀 What you need to learn from this incident.
: Being loud isn't unacceptable. But the contexts matter.
If you go to a concert, party, festival.. you can be as loud as you want.
But in public areas such as a restaurant, a coffee shop, a public park and BTS etc. where people share the spaces. Please keep quiet. Doesn't mean that you can't speak or talk. You can, of course. But don't raise your voice like shouting or screaming.
Remember that there isn't any law or rule enforced on this. But this is about "greng-jai - เกรงใจ" 👌
There isn't a direct translation but basically "greng-jai" is when you don't disturb or bother others.
Read the room and keep the peace 🍀
"Greng-jai" is a core value of Thai culture and Thai people. That's why we're always speak quietly in public areas.
If you know how to be "greng-jai" , respectful and kind. I'm sure you will experience the best part of Thai people and Thailand. ❤️
OPINION | Your money bought a holiday, not a licence
"Sorry for bringing money to your country."
That was the line thrown back at a Thai woman today, after she asked a group of young foreign tourists on the BTS to lower their voices. She was not aggressive. She said talking was fine, just at a normal volume, because people here do not shout on the train. She was laughed at, told to shut up, and jeered at by the group until they got off at the next station.
Loud tourists exist everywhere, and most of them are simply young and oblivious, which is forgivable and fixable.
The sentence is the story. Because underneath those eight words sits an idea that surfaces again and again in Thailand, and it deserves to be dragged into the daylight and looked at properly.
The idea is this. My money makes me exempt.
What that money actually buys
Let us be precise about the transaction, because there seems to be some confusion.
Your money buys you a seat on the train, a room with air conditioning, someone to change your towels, a plate of food cooked by hands that have made it ten thousand times before. It buys you access to temples that took centuries to build, beaches that took millennia, and a language and a culture that owe you absolutely nothing.
More than that, it buys you the thing travel is supposed to be for. A wider view of the world. The experience of being somewhere that does not run on your assumptions. The privilege of learning how other people live, and coming home slightly less certain that your own way is the only way.
That is what the money is for. To make you a broader person. To make you a better one.
It does not buy you the right to treat the people who live here as staff.
If this were only about volume on a train, it would not be worth an editorial.
But the same idea, scaled up, has produced some of the ugliest incidents this country has seen in recent years.
In 2024, a Swiss man in Phuket kicked a Thai doctor in the back as she sat on steps near his rented villa, because he decided she was trespassing. An investigation later found the steps were built illegally on public land, land that was never his to defend. Hundreds of locals protested outside the villa. His visa was revoked.
That case became famous not because a man lost his temper, but because of the assumption behind it. That paying to be here meant the public beach access had become his private staircase.
The same assumption shows up in smaller ways every week. In foreigners working jobs reserved by law for Thais. In wrecked hotel rooms and smashed-up government offices. In the fights that break out on Bangla Road with such regularity that Phuket residents have started asking publicly how many a day the island is expected to absorb.
None of that is a cultural misunderstanding. Nobody needs a guidebook to know you should not kick a stranger or start a brawl. Those are decisions, made by people who calculated that the consequences would be light because of who they are and where they are.
The rest of you already know this
We want to be very clear about it, because Thaiger is read by hundreds of thousands of foreigners who live in and love this country.
This is not about you.
Ask almost any long-term foreign resident in Thailand what they think of the guy shouting on the Skytrain, and you will get an eye roll and a sigh. They are not defending him. They are embarrassed by him, because he makes their life here harder. He is the reason a shopkeeper braces slightly when a foreigner walks in. He is the reason the good ones keep having to prove they are not him.
The overwhelming majority of visitors are courteous, curious and welcome. Thailand knows this. It is why the welcome here remains genuinely warm after decades of mass tourism, in a way that has already worn thin in Barcelona, Venice and Kyoto.
But that welcome is not infinite, and it is not unconditional. It is extended by people who have their own homes, their own commutes, their own bad days, and who are under no obligation to absorb somebody else's rudeness because that person bought a plane ticket.
A simple ask
Nobody is asking tourists to be perfect. Learn a phrase or two. Keep your voice down in a quiet carriage. Take your shoes off when someone else does. Apologise when you get it wrong, because you will, and that is fine.
And if a stranger politely asks you to be quieter on a train, the correct answer is not a comment about your wallet. It is "sorry", and then quieter.
Money is not the currency of respect here. Respect is.
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