Thai locals confront the consequences of the country’s decades-long tourism push

As tourists step off the pier on Thailand’s Koh Phangan island, they’re greeted by a sales pitch tailored to outsiders — billboards touting luxury beachfront plots or clifftop villas as high-yield investments, a message repeated along the palm-fringed roads winding up into the hills.

This tiny tropical island of fewer than 10,000 is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Southeast Asia, welcoming more than 1 million overseas visitors a year. But locals say a surge in internationally run businesses and land ownership is reshaping it beyond recognition, breeding resentment toward some foreign nationals that has spread across the country.

“All the projects we see up on the hillside belong to foreigners. There are so many new villas being built,” said Preecha Thongyad, a Koh Phangan-born real estate investor, as he pointed to clusters of magazine-worthy villas. “It wasn’t like this before. In the past, when you looked at the hills, they were still green.”

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