Best Posts in Thread: SE Asia - Thailand most Dangerous Tourist Destination for Aussie Travelers:

I don't see where they broke down the type of death by country. I see an example of a two idiots (or possible drunks) that didn't know how to drive jet-skis. Thailand didn't make them stupid or kill them, not knowing how to safely operate a jet-ski did that. How many of the "accidents" had alcohol and motor vehicles in the mix? I don't consider accidents involving alcohol as "accidents"....but maybe the Thai government does.

Thailand didn't make Aussies old or kill them by natural causes (blame time for that).

"Illness" is a pretty broad term. How are they recording these illnesses? Elderly people dying of things that wouldn't kill a younger healthier person?

Missing persons? How many wanted to go missing? Asia is a great place to get lost if you want. I'm sure there are some that were snatched up but....

In jail overseas? Stop overstaying your visas, getting in bar fights, doing/transporting drugs and raping little kids. Pretty easy to not get arrested with a bit of common sense.

I bet if they required an IQ test before letting people travel abroad these numbers would go down drastically.

 

Did the article show the total number of Aussies that have traveled to Thailand (or overseas) during the same time frame? I don't recall that number being in the article. Without the total number of tourists visiting the country the number of people dying is completely meaningless. If Thailand was visited by more Aussie tourists than other countries then it should be no surprise that more people died in Thailand. Is the per 100k rate of death for each statistic even higher than that of Australia?

I couldn't find a chart for Aussie tourists alone but if we just look at the total number of visitors to each country and make an assumption that Aussie tourists somewhat follow these travel trends (although I would guess that countries closer to Australia, such as New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, likely have a slightly higher percentage of Aussie tourists) then it looks like Thailand might be one of the safest countries for Aussies to visit.

...it looks like Thailand is MUCH safer to visit than the Philippines. Shouldn't be any real surprises there; Thai hospitals and health infrastructure is light years ahead of the Philippines. If I had to pick a place to be old (or treated for any illness/injury) it sure as hell wouldn't be the Philippines.

 

The goal of those scams is to get money out of people, not throw them in jail. If I got caught up in one of those scams I would pay the bribe, report it to the proper authorities (and also report them to my government and say they were trying to get classified/sensitive information out of me) and never return to that country to give them another chance.

 

One thing to take into account when reading about "American" deaths in the Philippines is the number of dual citizens the country has. It kind of skews the statistics IMO. Most FilAms are familiar with their home country and/or has family there that will be aware of, give warning about, or protect them against certain risks that a "pure" American/foreigner/tourist wouldn't have a clue about.

Note: There are over 3.4 million Filipino-Americans in the US (the largest group of Asian-Americans in the US). The data you provided will count them as "Americans" visiting the Philippines. These Filipino-Americans will have a safety net (family) in the Philippines that those of us actual foreigners/tourists won't have. They also tend to not move back to the Philippines to retire. From what I've seen (anecdotal evidence) the elderly foreigners tend to be targets of violent crime more often as they pose much less of a risk to the criminal. I suspect the countries in the data-set below that have really high rates of "American Travelers" are actually dominated by dual-citizens or second generation Americans with family ties in the country in question.

From your source:


I can't be sure but I believe if you exclude those that grew up and have family in the Philippines the death rate of Americans would be higher than that of Thailand. (It's already pretty close when including Filipino-Americans.) But I could be wrong, perhaps Filipino-Americans are just as likely to be killed in the Philippines as their fellow lighter/darker skinned Americans are....but I really doubt that.

It would be interesting to see what the statistics are when dual-citizens are excluded.