{"id":2046,"date":"2014-12-30T09:03:08","date_gmt":"2014-12-30T07:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thailandee.com\/blog\/en\/?p=2046"},"modified":"2014-12-30T09:03:08","modified_gmt":"2014-12-30T07:03:08","slug":"wat-pho-entrance-fee-will-increase-100-january-1st","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thailandee.com\/blog\/en\/index.php\/2046-wat-pho-entrance-fee-will-increase-100-january-1st","title":{"rendered":"Wat Pho entrance fee will increase by 100% on January 1st"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few years ago, i advised people to go\u00a0in the late afternoon at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thailandee.com\/eng\/see-visit-thailand\/wat-po-bangkok-1\">Wat Pho temple in Bangkok<\/a> to attend the monk chanting at 5 pm. At that time,\u00a0visitors\u00a0only paid 50 baht to entry the building with the\u00a0famous reclining Buddha and could walk\u00a0freely in the rest of the temple. After an initial 100%\u00a0increase and the installation of turnstiles at the entrance that\u00a0transformed the temple into a some\u00a0amusement park, in 2012, a new 100%\u00a0increase\u00a0is planned for\u00a01st January 2015 . <strong>The ticket for foreigners visitors will then be at 200 baht.<\/strong><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_4078\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-4078\" style=\"width: 600px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-4078 size-medium\" style=\"font-weight: bold;\" src=\"http:\/\/www.thailandee.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/wat-pho-foreigner-fee-600x401.jpg\" alt=\"Prix Wat Pho Bangkok\" width=\"600\" height=\"401\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-4078\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Wat Pho entrance fee was 50 THB in 2011 anfd will be 200 THB in 2015<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>The Wat Pho entry price will rise to 200 THB in January whih means a\u00a0400% increase in 3 years.<br \/>Wat Pho is certainly a must see for any <a href=\"\/eng\/cities\/to-see-to-visit-in-bangkok\">visit in\u00a0Bangkok<\/a> but turning a religious temple in such a cash cow, raises questions and restarts the old debate of dual pricing visitors Thai \/ foreign visitors. For Thais, access to the temple is\u00a0free.<\/p>\n<p>While I can understand\u00a0it when the\u00a0entrance fee is 20 or 50 baht, the argument that Thai visitors always donate money to the temple or pay some offerings and at the end it is the price that a foreign pay, I have to say that the average donation is certainly less than 200 baht. And there are foreigners including me who laso donate when they visit a temple.<\/p>\n<p>So let&#8217;s\u00a0\u00a0recognize that the only goal is to make money ! Given that 200 THB\u00a0is only around\u00a05 euros, I am ready to accept it. But\u00a0it is hard to know what the money is used for. Does it really go to renovate the temple or for charity ?<\/p>\n<p>With the number of foreign visitors that daily enter Wat Po, the temple, with its current rate of 100 THB, earns 500,000 baht a day and so will win 1 million a day from January 1st. So 356 million baht for 2015. And that&#8217;s without counting donations !<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I highly recommend you to visit Wat Po\u00a0but those who had the opportunity to go there before\u00a02012, will understand\u00a0why I am nostalgic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few years ago, i advised people to go\u00a0in the late afternoon at the Wat<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-visit-information"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thailandee.com\/blog\/en\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thailandee.com\/blog\/en\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thailandee.com\/blog\/en\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thailandee.com\/blog\/en\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thailandee.com\/blog\/en\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2046"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thailandee.com\/blog\/en\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2047,"href":"https:\/\/www.thailandee.com\/blog\/en\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046\/revisions\/2047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thailandee.com\/blog\/en\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thailandee.com\/blog\/en\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thailandee.com\/blog\/en\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}