The return trip: What Thailand knows about tourism that Guam needs to learn
- Admin
- 3 hours ago
- 6 min read
There is a small bakery in Tumon that my family visits nearly every morning. The bagels are good—genuinely good—but that is not why we keep going back. We go back because the staff knows us. They ask how our week is going. They smile like they mean it. By the third visit, they know we always order two iced matcha lattes with no sugar.
I have lived on Guam long enough to watch visitors come and go: the Korean honeymooners on Tumon Bay, the Japanese families loading up at the duty-free, the American military families discovering the island for the first time. I have also watched which businesses those visitors seek out on their next trip, and which ones they forget the moment their plane lifts off. That bakery, without a marketing budget or a loyalty program, has cracked the code that Guam’s entire tourism industry is still trying to solve.
In 2024, Guam welcomed 739,000 visitors, a 12.5 percent improvement over 2023 and progress genuinely worth acknowledging. But those numbers are still just 44 percent of the 1.67 million visitors Guam hosted in 2019. Visitor spending sits nearly 40 percent below its pre-pandemic peak.
The standard industry response has been to spend more on advertising in Seoul and Tokyo and celebrate each incremental uptick as a sign that recovery is on track. It is not enough. Pouring more first-time visitors into a leaky bucket is not a strategy. The missing piece—the one Thailand figured out decades ago—is simpler, harder and far more valuable: make people want to come back.
Thailand received approximately 35.5 million tourists in 2024, nearly matching its pre-pandemic record. Bangkok reclaimed the top spot in Agoda’s Repeat Visitor Rankings among Asian cities. The number that should stop every tourism official on Guam cold: approximately 60 percent of Thailand’s tourists are repeat visitors.
That is not geography or luck. It is the product of a deliberate commitment to one operating principle: treat visitors so well that returning feels natural.
Thailand calls itself the “Land of Smiles” — not a marketing slogan but a service standard, consistently maintained, that creates the emotional connection repeat visitation requires. When visitors feel comfortable early in a trip, research shows they enjoy more, spend more and are far more likely to return.
My family’s experience at that Tumon bakery is the same mechanism at work. The bagel brings us the first time. The people bring us back every time after. Research consistently confirms this: the primary driver of repeat visits is the quality of human encounters—staff who are warm, attentive and genuinely present. Not the hotel pool. The person behind the counter.
Guam has a natural advantage it chronically underestimates. The CHamoru value of inafa’maolek— mutual care, making things good for one another—is a disposition toward hospitality that, consistently expressed, becomes the island’s most powerful tourism asset. Thailand built its entire identity around its people. Guam has the same raw material. What it lacks is the system that cultivates and rewards it.
The cost is asymmetric. A Korean couple who feels processed rather than welcomed does not come back—and in the age of social media, they tell others. One cold experience on a travel forum reaches an audience no GVB budget can counter.
Here is the honest truth that Guam’s tourism marketing has been reluctant to state plainly: the primary reason Korean and Japanese tourists choose Guam is not the CHamoru culture. It is America. Korea and Japan account for 78.9 percent of all visitors to Guam. These travelers are not booking flights for an anthropological experience. They are coming for the most accessible piece of the United States available to them—familiar brands, American safety standards, the American flag—without a 10-hour flight.
This does not make CHamoru culture irrelevant; it redefines its role. The latte stones, the kelaguen, the Wednesday night market at Hagåtña are not the headline that sells the ticket. They are the texture that makes Guam feel distinct from Hawaii or the mainland, the memory a visitor carries home. Thailand’s temples work the same way: tourists don’t go to Thailand for Buddhism, but the temples make it feel irreplaceable rather than interchangeable.
Guam’s “America in the Pacific” identity is a strength — lean into it and let the culture add depth.
Four things that would change everything
First: create a dish worth flying back for. Guam has no signature food that visitors dream about on the flight home. The most accessible CHamoru food tends to be charcoal barbecue that can skew oversalted—earnest, but not transcendent. That is a solvable problem.
Pad Thai was not ancient tradition. It was deliberately created in the 1930s by the Thai government, which distributed a standardized recipe nationwide and handed out free street carts to vendors—a wartime necessity that became a global culinary icon.
Guam sits at the crossroads of American, CHamoru, Filipino, Korean and Japanese food cultures. A structured culinary competition inviting Korean and Japanese chefs to collaborate with local talent could crystallize something genuinely new and uniquely Guam’s own. A visitor who returns specifically for a dish unavailable anywhere else is the most loyal visitor the tourism industry can produce.
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Second: enforce quality that visitors can count on. None of the above matters if the baseline experience is unreliable. Some restaurants on Guam are run-down, with dirty walls and food that has no business being served. Humidity is not the explanation. Other establishments maintain exceptional standards under identical conditions.
The explanation is accountability. Guam’s Division of Environmental Health has eight inspectors for approximately 3,000 health-regulated establishments, conducting roughly 1,200 inspections per year — about 10 percent of what it is legally mandated to perform. Some establishments go up to four years between checks. Funding adequate inspection capacity is a tourism infrastructure investment. Restaurants that know they will be inspected invest differently in their kitchens and their standards.
Third: fix the events calendar before marketing it. Guam has 19 annual village fiestas and a growing cultural calendar — rotating experiences that, in theory, give repeat visitors new reasons to return. In practice, many are underfunded and not yet ready for international promotion. The sequence matters: build the foundation first.
The Guam Visitors Bureau spends $5 million marketing to Korea and $3.8 million to Japan annually. Some of that is better spent making events worth attending than advertising ones that disappoint.
Fourth: eliminate tip anxiety for the visitors most likely to return. Korea and Japan are non-tipping cultures. For the 78.9 percent of Guam’s visitors from those markets, a rotating tablet screen with 20 percent, 25 percent and 30 percent options is not a familiar social cue; it is confusion and quiet discomfort at the close of an otherwise pleasant experience.
As this author has argued in these pages, that closing moment carries outsized weight. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s “peak-end rule” holds that people judge an experience by how it ended—meaning a pressured tip prompt can hollow out the goodwill an entire meal built.
A 2025 study in the International Journal of Hospitality Management confirmed that unexpected gratuity solicitations measurably reduced satisfaction and likelihood to return. The fix requires no legislation—only willingness to lead: adopt service-inclusive pricing, post a simple sign, and let visitors end their meal the way they end meals at home. That is the kind of detail repeat visitors remember.
What the legislature can do
One structural change would help immediately: exempt unprepared food from the business privilege tax. Guam’s BPT stands at 4.5 percent. Taxing food ingredients at 4.5 percent raises costs at every grocery store and squeezes the margin restaurants need to invest in better sourcing and staff training. Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia already exempt unprepared groceries from equivalent taxes.
Legislation to create this exemption has already been introduced. The objection that businesses pocket tax savings rather than passing them to consumers is legitimate for across-the-board cuts — a targeted food exemption is a different instrument, with households and small food businesses as its primary beneficiaries.
The blueprint is already here
Thailand’s 60 percent repeat visitor rate is not the product of beaches or temples. It is the product of a system—consistent warmth, reliable quality, enough variety to reward the return trip — applied at every point of the visitor experience.
Guam has the raw material for the same system. What it lacks is the will to build it deliberately: invest in people, create a culinary identity worth returning for, enforce the standards that make a destination trustworthy, and remove the tax barriers that stand in the way.
The bakery in Tumon does not advertise. It does not have a loyalty program. It just makes people feel like they belong — and trusts that they will return. For Guam’s tourism industry, that bakery is not a small business. It is a blueprint.
Samuel S. Kim is a tech executive and engineering leader with over 20 years of R&D experience. He founded a 60-person research division in Seoul and holds an economics degree from UCLA. He writes as a resident and registered voter of Guam.
Like many drawn to this island, he came hoping to stay — and is still working toward that.
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