Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva told his country's travel industry leaders at the 'Thai Tourism in the Next Decade' forum that the country needs to focus more on quality tourism.

To me that means we need to attract higher yield, higher disposable income, higher spending leisure and business visitors.

Prime Minister Abhisit is to be saluted for his opinion. Thailand needs to move away from its dependence on increasingly irrelevant, low yield mass tourism.

Official government statistics show that international arrivals in 2011 will reach about 16.6 million, an increase of 4.4%. To put that in context, Thailand's Ministry of Tourism and Sport reports that the country recorded annual tourism growth of 7.5% between 2005 and 2010, with visitor arrivals growing from 11.5 million in 2005 to around 15.8 million last year.

However, macro statistics like this are increasingly misleading. Look closer and you'll discover that long-haul, long stay, higher spending visitors are being replaced by shorter stay mid-market visitors who spend less per capita per visit.

A new and unsustainable trend has emerged. The country has to run faster to stay still. Because more tourists stay shorter and spend less, Thailand needs to maintain double digit growth in arrivals just to match the preceding year's tourism earnings.

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