I was in Bangkok a few days ago (late 2010) with friends and we stayed at Khaosan Road, the western traveler mecca. We did multiple laps of the nearby streets in our short stay there. Anything less than a month should count as short stay. Bangkok and Thailand deserve more. Airlines like AIR ASIA will help the deserving.
All of Bangkok bustles with services and potable trinkets on sale. potable being the operative word. You can’t entice travelers facing airline luggage restrictions to buy the local furniture. I was doing this trip to SE Asia thanks to cheap tickets on Air Asia. Walking through the markets I couldn’t help wondering : If the internet allowed us to now transcend geography and buy/consume the best digital services, borders be damned, could cheap air fares ensure the market for physical items went to the best out there too ?
Why buy the overpriced smartphone or Laptop at the local showroom when you can snag it at your next short weekend break, thanks to airlines like AIR ASIA?. A decade ago impossible. Now, thanks to upstarts like Air Asia, easy.
If the CEO is mapping out market threats, on the Porter’s 5 competitive forces framework now he should add ‘cheap air travel tickets‘ in the ‘Power Of Buyers section’.
My hypothesis : Cheap air fares will do, for some industries, what Amazon did to book sellers.
2025 Update : Cheap Air Travel did take off since this 2010 post. Asia and Europe is even more accessible to tourists in 2025 vs 2010. But I did not factor in the possibility that no one had to travel anywhere to shop if the brochure was online and anything in it came to their doorstep in 2 weeks, without too much trouble or cost. When I wrote the post in 2010 Aliexpress.com had just launched. Temu was a decade+ away, low tariffs + new massive container ships, esp Chinese, were making inroads at ports across the world.
Today, in ~2 weeks, most anything you desire can be with you, cheaply enough.
Did my hypothesis pan out ? Not really. Air Travel did become cheap but Temu is cheaper.
Third Eye Observations 