Myanmar should be one of Southeast Asia’s great tourism success stories. Instead, war, human rights abuses, criminal scam compounds, kidnappings, and a fractured state have turned one of ASEAN’s most intriguing destinations into one of its biggest tourism failures. Can ASEAN help bring Myanmar—and its visitors—back?
Myanmar Tourism Is Missing While Its Neighbors Boom
Thailand is welcoming millions. Vietnam is breaking tourism records. Malaysia is expanding. Cambodia is competing for visitors, and even Laos has found new momentum through improved connectivity.
And then there is Myanmar.
Myanmar possesses almost everything a successful tourism destination could ask for.
Bagan is one of Asia’s extraordinary archaeological landscapes. Yangon has the Shwedagon Pagoda and some of Southeast Asia’s most fascinating urban heritage. Mandalay remains a name that itself evokes travel and romance. Inle Lake, the Irrawaddy River, Buddhist monasteries, beaches, mountains, food, ethnic diversity, and proximity to Thailand, China, and India should give Myanmar an enviable position on the Asian tourism map.
But international tourism is largely missing.
Myanmar received approximately 4.36 million international visitors in 2019. By 2024, official Myanmar tourism statistics recorded just over one million international arrivals—around a quarter of the pre-pandemic number.
Even that comparison can be misleading. A substantial majority of recorded arrivals entered across land borders, meaning the number should not simply be interpreted as one million conventional international vacationers. This is not primarily a tourism marketing failure.
It is a security, governance, human rights, and confidence catastrophe that has spilled directly into travel and tourism.
A UN Report That Should Alarm the Global Tourism Industry
A new UN assessment reported by Al Jazeera paints an alarming picture of Myanmar.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk described a continuing deterioration involving military attacks, civilian deaths, displacement, restrictions on humanitarian assistance, environmental exploitation, and expanding criminal networks. Myanmar has millions of internally displaced people.
Large parts of the country remain affected by armed conflict. State authority is fragmented. Armed organizations control territory. Airstrikes continue. Landmines remain a threat.
At the same time, transnational criminal organizations have exploited this instability precisely. For tourism, this combination is devastating. A successful tourism destination doesn’t only need attractive hotels and famous monuments.
It needs something far more fundamental: trust.
- A traveler must trust that the road between the airport and hotel is safe.
- A tour operator must trust that tomorrow’s itinerary will still be accessible.
- An airline must trust the destination.
- An insurance company must be willing to insure the traveler.
- A hotel investor must know who controls the land.
Foreign governments must believe their citizens can travel without unreasonable danger. And visitors must believe that if something goes wrong, police, hospitals, courts, embassies, and emergency services can actually help. Myanmar cannot presently offer this confidence on a nationwide basis.
Do Not Travel to Myanmar
This is reflected in foreign travel advisories. Australia currently tells its citizens: Do not travel to Myanmar.The United States maintains its highest warning, Level 4: Do Not Travel.
The reasons include armed conflict, arbitrary detention, civil unrest, landmines, crime, inadequate healthcare, and limited ability to provide consular assistance. For the international tourism industry, such warnings have enormous consequences.
Tour operators face duty-of-care questions. Insurance policies may exclude destinations subject to official warnings. Corporate travel managers will refuse approval. International groups and conferences go elsewhere.
- No advertising campaign can overcome that.
- No tourism slogan can fix it.
- No influencer campaign can compensate for a government telling its citizens not to go.
The Scam Centers Changed the Equation
There is another Myanmar story that should particularly concern the global travel industry. It involves the notorious scam compounds concentrated in areas along the Thai-Myanmar border, including Myawaddy, Shwe Kokko, and KK Park. These are not simply rooms filled with people sending fraudulent emails.
They have developed into industrialized criminal enterprises involving cyber fraud, human trafficking, forced labor, money laundering, physical abuse, and detention. Thousands of foreigners have reportedly ended up inside such compounds.
Some victims are kidnapped. Many others are recruited through fake employment opportunities, travel voluntarily to Southeast Asia, and only later discover that the promised job does not exist.
Passports may be confiscated. Victims can be transported across borders and forced to conduct online fraud. Those refusing to cooperate have reported beatings, torture, threats, and other serious abuses. This creates a terrifying intersection between travel and transnational organized crime.
It would be inaccurate to suggest that ordinary tourists arriving at Yangon hotels are routinely being kidnapped and taken to scam compounds. That is not the principal pattern. But destination reputation does not operate with such nuance.
The international headline becomes: Foreigners trafficked. Foreigners detained. Foreigners tortured. Myanmar.That is disastrous for tourism confidence. More importantly, the ability of enormous criminal compounds to exist reveals a much deeper problem.
It suggests that in parts of Myanmar, effective territorial control, law enforcement, and accountability have been replaced by complicated relationships between armed groups, business interests, criminal networks, and political authorities. That is fundamentally incompatible with a normal tourism economy.
Haven’t the Scam Centers Been Closed?
There have been crackdowns. Authorities have announced operations against scam centers, buildings have been demolished, victims have been released, and Thailand and China have become increasingly involved. Thousands of suspected trafficking victims and workers have been removed from compounds during different operations. Myanmar authorities have publicized the destruction of buildings associated with online gambling and telecom fraud.
China has put considerable pressure on regional governments to act, partly because Chinese citizens have been both victims and targets of these operations. Thailand is critical because electricity, telecommunications, financial transactions, transportation, border crossings, and logistics can connect the compounds with the outside world. Yet the criminal ecosystem has proved remarkably resilient.
When one location becomes difficult, operations can relocate. Closing buildings is therefore not enough. Governments have to destroy the business model.
That means following bank accounts, cryptocurrency, telecommunications, recruiters, transportation networks, electricity supplies, property ownership, beneficial owners, corrupt officials, and the people providing political or armed protection.
How Can This Happen Inside ASEAN?
This raises an uncomfortable question. Myanmar is not an isolated failed state outside the international system. It belongs to ASEAN.
How can a member of one of the world’s increasingly important regional organizations deteriorate to this point? The answer lies partly in understanding what ASEAN is—and what it isn’t. ASEAN is not the European Union. There is no ASEAN government capable of ordering Myanmar to change course. There is no ASEAN police force that can enter Myanmar. There is no equivalent of an EU-style supranational system capable of overriding national sovereignty. ASEAN was built around principles including consensus, sovereignty, dialogue, and non-interference.
The famous “ASEAN Way” has helped countries with very different political systems cooperate and has contributed to remarkable regional stability. But Myanmar demonstrates its weakness. What happens when the internal actions of one member create massive regional consequences?
- Refugees cross borders.
- Trafficking crosses borders.
- Cybercrime crosses borders.
- Money laundering crosses borders.
- Weapons cross borders.
- Victims come from numerous ASEAN countries.
- And the reputation of Southeast Asia as a safe tourism region is affected.
At that point, what exactly remains “internal”?
ASEAN Tried the Five-Point Consensus
After Myanmar’s 2021 military takeover, ASEAN adopted its Five-Point Consensus. It called for an immediate cessation of violence, constructive dialogue, an ASEAN special envoy, humanitarian assistance, and engagement with relevant stakeholders. The problem is not that ASEAN did nothing.
The problem is that the mechanism has produced far too little compared with the scale of the crisis. Five years later, violence continues.
Myanmar’s top political representatives have been excluded from normal high-level ASEAN participation, and ASEAN has repeatedly demanded progress.
But ASEAN operates largely through consensus and diplomatic pressure. It possesses limited enforcement mechanisms. Myanmar therefore exposes perhaps the greatest contradiction facing ASEAN as it develops into an increasingly integrated economic and tourism region:
How much non-interference can ASEAN maintain when instability inside one country threatens citizens and economies throughout the region?
Scam Centers Could Be Where ASEAN Gets Tough
ASEAN may have limited ability to resolve Myanmar’s civil conflict. It has considerably more ability to attack transnational organized crime. This distinction could be crucial. Scam compounds depend on international infrastructure.
- They need telecommunications.
- They need banking.
- They need payment systems and cryptocurrency exchanges.
- They need recruiters.
- They need border transportation.
- They need electricity.
- They need companies through which money can be laundered.
- Many of these elements exist outside the physical compounds.
ASEAN members could establish a permanent multinational scam-center task force combining financial intelligence units, immigration authorities, police, telecom regulators, anti-trafficking agencies, and cybersecurity investigators. Success should not be measured by how many buildings are demolished.
It should be measured by how many criminal organizers are prosecuted, victims rescued, bank accounts frozen, recruiters arrested, telecommunications channels terminated, corrupt facilitators identified, and criminal proceeds confiscated.
This is also directly relevant to tourism. Southeast Asia cannot simultaneously market itself as one of the world’s safest and most welcoming tourism regions while industrial-scale compounds traffic foreign nationals across ASEAN borders.
Tourism Could Become Part of Myanmar’s Recovery
There is another side to this story. Myanmar’s tourism potential has not disappeared.
- Bagan is still Bagan.
- The Shwedagon Pagoda still rises above Yangon.
- Inle Lake remains extraordinary.
- Myanmar’s cultural heritage, landscapes, food, hospitality traditions, and geographic position remain valuable.
If security eventually improves, tourism could become one of the fastest mechanisms for returning income to ordinary people. Tourism employs more than hotel owners.
It supports drivers, guides, restaurants, farmers, handicraft producers, artists, boat operators, airlines, travel agencies, small businesses, and communities. That makes tourism potentially important to post-conflict economic recovery. But restarting it prematurely would be a serious mistake.
The sequence must be:
Security. Rule of law. Freedom of movement. International confidence. Insurance. Air connectivity. Investment. Tourism promotion.
Not the other way around.
ASEAN Could Create a Tourism Recovery Mechanism
When conditions permit, ASEAN could play a fascinating role. Instead of Myanmar simply announcing that it is safe again, ASEAN countries could participate in independent assessments of designated tourism corridors. The first test should be remarkably simple:
Would ASEAN governments confidently recommend these destinations to their own citizens?
Specific destinations could reopen progressively rather than declaring the entire country safe.
ASEAN could establish common tourism-security standards covering licensed transportation, verified accommodation, emergency communications, medical evacuation, tourist police, trafficking awareness, crisis response, and independently monitored travel corridors.
Such an ASEAN-backed certification would have much greater international credibility than a domestic advertising campaign. Regional tourism could return first.
Travelers from Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, India, Japan, and South Korea could potentially provide the initial recovery market before long-haul European and North American tourism returns at scale.
Eventually, Myanmar could again become part of extraordinary overland and aviation tourism circuits linking Bangkok, Yangon, Bagan, Mandalay, Chiang Mai, and other destinations across mainland Southeast Asia.
But there is another requirement.
Tourism Must Not Finance Abuse
Future investors and hotel groups will have to know who benefits from tourism revenue.
- Who owns the hotel?
- Who owns the land?
- Who controls the transportation company?
- Was a community displaced?
Is a business connected to sanctioned individuals, military-linked enterprises, armed organizations, or criminal networks?
International tourism companies increasingly conduct environmental, social, governance, and human-rights due diligence. Myanmar therefore faces two different tourism tests.
The first is:
- Is it safe to visit?
- The second is:
- Is it responsible to invest and spend money there?
- Both have to be answered.
Myanmar’s Tourism Collapse Is a Warning to ASEAN
Myanmar should matter to tourism leaders far beyond Myanmar. ASEAN increasingly markets Southeast Asia as an interconnected tourism region. Visitors do not necessarily understand its political borders as governments do. A traveler considering Thailand may also consider Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, or Myanmar.
Security incidents involving trafficking, kidnapping, or organized crime therefore have regional reputational consequences. Myanmar demonstrates that tourism cannot be separated from governance. A beautiful destination without security is not competitive. A luxury hotel surrounded by lawlessness is not a luxury product.
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