* Thailand: Data suggests supply/demand mismatch
By Susan Cunningham
HotelNewsNow.com Correspondent
BANGKOK—Tourism in Thailand has bounced back strongly since the global meltdown of 2009, despite continuing economic doldrums in Western countries and Thailand’s continuing political instability.
New source markets have momentum, tourism revenue was up 8% last year and more than 18,000 hotel rooms will enter the market within the next three years. Yet the mood in Bangkok earlier this month at TravelTrends.biz’s “No Vacancy” conference was cautious—even somber.
“There’s a disconnect between luxury hotels and growth in mass tourism,” said Bill Barnett, managing director of Phuket-based consultancy C9 Hotelworks. “There’s a disconnect when it comes to infrastructure … MORE
* 48 Heroes of Philanthropy
From helping earthquake victims to sending poor kids to college, they’re boosting the region in many ways.
We pick 48 givers, 4 from each of 12 countries. Some are big tycoons, even billionaires, who have a large vision of how best to help society and have donated millions of dollars to back up that vision. Others are little-known citizens who are extremely generous with their limited funds … MORE
Written by several Forbes contributors, including me.
* Back To His Roots
Washington SyCip attended Philippine public schools when they were among the best in Asia. Now nearly 90, he’s working to make them good again.
Washington SyCip at SGV, April 2011
By Susan J. Cunningham
Milwida Guevara didn’t know Washington SyCip when he turned up at her foundation’s launch in Manila in 2002. She had started the Synergeia Foundation to help keep poor children in grade school. “Our dream, really, was to give every Filipino child a decent opportunity to have a grade six education,” she says. The statistics were grim … MORE
* Review: Tsai Ming-Liang’s “Face” is kind of mesmerizing
Best movies from the World Film Festival of Bangkok
- Image from Tsai Ming-Liang’s “Face”
Perhaps I’ve undergone a conversion experience. “Face” (aka “Visage”) is a long 140 minutes but may be Tsai Ming-Liang’s most beautiful, accessible movie to date. Granted, I’d only seen two before this one: “What Time Is It There?” and the one with the watermelon. Perhaps once you have seen a few of the Taiwanese director’s movies, his signature motifs reverberate: holes, tunnels, stairways and long, bare, lonely corridors. Vicious plumbing. Two characters wordlessly trying to communicate. Very long shots of a human walking (usually laboring) toward the camera from a great distance along a dingy tiled corridor.
The opening scene is vintage Tsai: actor Lee Kang-sheng turns on a kitchen faucet and the water blows out like a geyser. He struggles to quell it with a bucket. Meanwhile, water from the pipe under the sink explodes. In the next scene, he slogs knee deep down a flooded hallway to a room where a pregnant woman lies in bed. Read more »
