PATTAYA, Thailand – For many long-term visitors across Thailand, the conversation about affordability has become almost ritual. Sit at a beer bar in Pattaya and someone will complain that the city has changed, that prices are up, that it isn’t the same cheap paradise it was 15 or 20 years ago. But if you look closely, Pattaya is not the villain. Compared to Samui or Phuket, the city remains a bargain — hotel rooms at half the price, more competition among bars and restaurants, and an enormous range of midtier options. The real story isn’t the beach town you choose, it’s the currency in your wallet.
Phuket and Samui expose this difference brutally. A beachfront cocktail that costs 180–220 baht in Pattaya jumps to 350–500 baht on the islands, and no one blinks. An airport taxi that feels steep in Pattaya looks like a blessing when compared with Phuket’s famously high fares or Samui’s fixed-price monopoly. Even Thai domestic travelers quietly acknowledge it: you pay “holiday tax” just for stepping off the plane in these two islands. So why does Pattaya get the blame? Because it is the city that aging expats know best. It’s where they spent their youth, where a plate of fried rice once cost 40 baht, and where their memories distort expectations. When the bill rises to 100 baht, they take it personally.
Yet the deeper issue sits beneath these anecdotes. It isn’t Pattaya’s noodles or Samui’s taxis — it’s the Thai baht itself, which remains frustratingly strong. The global traveler’s purchasing power has eroded, not because Thailand is uniquely expensive, but because the currencies used to pay for it have weakened. When Americans or Europeans say, “Thailand used to be cheap,” what they really mean is, “Our currencies used to be strong.” The USD, once a juggernaut that could bulldoze across Asia, has sagged against the baht. The euro and pound haven’t fared much better. The change feels dramatic because so many visitors benchmark Thailand against their golden memories rather than their present bank accounts.
This is why the same traveler who once stayed six months now stays three weeks. Not because beer is 20 baht more, but because the exchange rate quietly extracts 15–25% of their budget before they even land. When your daily burn rate jumps from $35 to $50, the street food stall suddenly feels like a splurge and a three-star hotel becomes a luxury. Samui and Phuket reveal the truth more sharply because they were never built for budget travelers in the first place. They are islands of scarcity — airport duopolies, limited land, imported goods, controlled transport lanes — and when your money weakens, those structural costs hit harder.
Pattaya, by contrast, remains resilient precisely because it is abundant. Thousands of rooms, endless competition, walkable zones, local bus routes, street food and supermarkets sitting next to fine dining. It is not perfect, but its economy still bends toward the middle-income traveler. The irony is that this affordability now feels like a failure only when compared with the past, not the present. Pattaya did not become expensive — the world became poorer.
Whether Thailand adjusts its currency is another debate, one that goes far beyond tourism. Central banks do not manage exchange rates to please backpackers or retirees. But the sentiment among long-stay visitors is real and visceral. They don’t complain because they expect Thailand to be cheap; they complain because Thailand used to be their escape from the economies they couldn’t afford back home. When the Thai baht stands firm against a weakened dollar, that escape collapses. And it is easier to blame beach towns than macroeconomics.
