macaroni21

The world isn't divided into straight and gay. There are as many bisexuals as gay men. For social reasons, they identify as straight - they can't imagine otherwise - but in bed, with the right person, they can be quite fun.

Some years ago, a straight escort explained it this way: he found it hard to get it up while with clients, so he couldn't top. Yet he knew that he would be losing out on clients if he only insisted on handjobs, so he learned to bottom. That said, I suspected he was one of those who, two minutes into the session, might say it hurt too much because "you too big."

The thrill of finding out how he reacts and how he performs.....

I reckon you're including Prime in the "Silom 6" shops? They definitely have a roaring business and I would certainly believe the average masseur there gets 3 - 4 customers a day. But the reports I hear are that most of the time there is no sex, so that doesn't count in my sex-buyer column. They do foot massages too, and I don't know if foot massages are included in your 3 - 4 a day. The other Silom 6 shops I have passed by many times; I rarely see any customer go in or come out of them. >I don't see how that reflects on the go-go bar business. The massage and gogo businesses compete for the horny customer. At least the massage places with a sexual finish do. To the extent that a tourist is satisfied, say, in the afternoon with a sex massage, he might not feel a need to spend money at a gogo bar. What you're saying kind of confirms something I have observed too. The sex business is now primarily served by massage shops (maybe it has always been, but even if it has always been, I see the trend as increasingly so). The gogo bar businesses are failing to compete with the massage businesses for the horny customer.

I actually know someone who's a kind of computer geek who can spend days coding away at his desk, and sleeps in a sofa in the same room. For food, he orders in, and he's told me that he can order pizza and coke for several meals in a row. For a change once in a while, he orders a burger and Dr Pepper.

Gogo bars - I think in total 50 - 60 offs per night in high season. How do I get this estimate? In the bigger bars (Dream Boy, Jupiter, Moonlight) about 10 boys per night. If we watch the room carefully, we may see about 3 boys taken out each hour (4, at a stretch). Multiply this by 3 hours (10pm to 1 am) and we get 9 - 12 offs. I round it off to 10. Smaller bars (Fresh, Hotmale, Banana) I think 5 offs a night. I haven't sat long enough in Tawan to estimate whether it's more like a bigger bar or a smaller one. Add them all up and we get 50 - 60 offs a night from all the gogo bars. Massage parlours - difficult to estimate since we seldom see other customers around when we visit. However, the fact that we seldom see other customers can also mean that there are not that many. When I ask around, however, I do find that visitors to Thailand buy from massage parlours at least as often as from gogo bars. So, if I really have to hazard a (wild) guess, I'd say 80 - 100 massage bookings a day from tourists. When I do see other customers in massage parlours, they are more often than not a local Thai. This is also noteworthy. The parlours continue to get custom from locals whereas the gogo bars (in Bangkok, at least) have lost all their local customers. In fact, outside of the Silom Road and Surawong Road cluster, I think the majority of massage customers e.g. in Saphan Khwai or Plukjit are local. I say this is interesting because it shows how bad the gogo bars are that they can lose a whole section of the market. Apps? - even more difficult to estimate, but just about everyone I know tells me it's more trouble than they are worth, in a country with an unfamiliar language.

Good morning! Merry Christmas to all. And what do I do first thing? I come and check this forum. It's like opening Christmas presents (in lieu of the fact that nobody gives me Christmas presents anymore ) It's a bit sad, actually. Anyway, I notice that so far neither of us have referenced the post we're discussing. It is this one: The gogo business: untapped potential The question is: what percentage of gay male visitors to Thailand would be open to buying sex? I used an assumption of 20% in my post, but @10tazione thinks 5%. It could well be, but my sense is that while it may be 5% or even 3% when one is in one's home city, when one is in a foreign country with a much higher degree of anonymity, the percentage goes up. Does it go up to 20%? Or to 15%.... we can only guess. I agree that even if there is X percent who are open to buying sex while in Thailand, it doesn't mean that all the X percent will buy, and do so once a day. So, here's another variable. What fraction of this X percent will actually buy each day? I think, if the bars and massage parlours market themselves well and price themselves attractively (within cost reasons) we can easily find half or more of that X percent converting interest/desire to actual purchase each day. That the bars and massage parlours are nowhere near getting half through their doors tells us that they are not marketing themselves as well as they should. Businessmen, if they have a mind to, can make time, especially in the evenings, for bars and offs. I used to travel quite a bit on business to many countries and I can say this with confidence. Often, they extend their stays an extra day or so to "unwind" from the stress of the business meetings. Not far from their minds is that a business trip is an expenses-paid trip. They're hardly spending any of their personal money, and thus to them throwing unspent money in bars and on boys and girls barely hurts the pocket. In our very own Silom-Surawong area, Thaniya Road is a good example. The scene there rose on the backs of Japanese businessmen.

Very strange choice of a hub airport. Seems to me that there are other non-aviation considerations involved. An effective hub airport is one with good connections regionally. Vientiane is not that. It's also hard to see Vladivostok (population 600,000) as a place with enough outbound tourists to make anything of a hub out of Vientiane.

I don't think there'll be any boys available at 8pm. Don't they start work at 9?

@10tazione I am glad you're taking up the challenge to think through these issues. Indeed my numbers are basically back-of-the-envelope estimates, so they are certainly open to debate. On the two questions you had: 1. I believe you're saying my estimate that tourists spend about half their days in Bangkok and half outside Bangkok, is too generous to Bangkok. I tried looking for data as to room nights in Bangkok versus room nights outside Bangkok but couldn't find them. In any case, I wasn't sure they'd be any good even if I did find them, because room nights data would almost surely include domestic tourists, rendering the numbers pretty useless when we're talking about foreign tourists. However, it is useful to imagine how a typical tourist who spends typically nine days in Thailand would divide his time. It's quite easy to imagine him spending a few days outside Bangkok e.g. Chiangmai or Pattaya in the middle of his holiday, but spends the first few nights and the last few nights in Bangkok, for convenience vis-a-vis Suvarnabhumi airport. I accept that there are tourists who fly directly to Chiangmai or Phuket and spend their whole vacation in the respective regions, but the Chiangmai numbers are small, the the Phuket numbers strongly seasonal. Counterbalancing that, there are plenty of business visitors who spend all their days in Bangkok and never leave the city. On balance I came to the estimate that about half the room nights of foreign visitors are probably spent in Bangkok. If you're a white farang, you need to resist the tendency to imagine the "typical tourist" as someone like you. The simple fact is that the majority of tourists coming to Thailand are Asian. They make relatively short trips of a week or slightly more and their interests centre around food, entertainment and shopping. 2. I believe you're saying that the rough figure of 20% of gay male tourists in Bangkok who are open to buying sex is too high an estimate. What do you think the percentage is likely to be? Note: I say "open to buying sex", not "actually buying sex." In fact, I emphasised in my blogpost that many of them are still not buying (my casual observation). Thus the point in my post - that the bars are not maximising their potential. There is discussion above about gay visitors in the closet, or too proud to buy. I have allowed for this - they're among the 80 percent who I reckon are not open to buying sex. Is 80 percent still too little? Do we think that maybe 90 or 95% are not at all open to the possibility of buying sex? You raised a good point about whether even if one were open to buying sex, would one be open to buying every day that one is in Bangkok? Some will be, some will not. I used to be somewhat like Vinapu twenty years ago when Thailand and Bangkok were new, bright, alluring and addictive. My daily rhythm was massage in the daytime (with sex), then off a bar boy in the evening, so twice a day. I was super-horny. In building my estimates, I assumed that the super-horny and the not-so-horny will probably balance each other out to average about 0.5 to 1 sex session per gay male tourist (who is open to buying) per day. So, if there is a potential market of 660 gay men in Bangkok open to buying sex, but they only buy 0.5 times a day there should still be 330 sex purchases a day (apps, massages and gogo bars combined). My observation is that the actual number of sex purchases by tourists is significantly lower than that. Thus the point of my post: In the sex business, there is quite a bit of upside potential among the tourists who are already in Thailand, but the potential is not properly exploited by the businesses. The question is: what's putting these tourists off?

I agree with you 200 percent. As you can see from my blogpost of September 2022 (Bangkok gogo bars: 15 years of price rises) I came to same conclusion. The bars got themselves into a vicious cycle of focussing on shows (which were never more than third rate), reeling straight gawkers in and relentless price rises. I also have records from 10 - 15 years ago where I noted my observations regarding customer numbers, and the current footfall that the bars are getting is only about half of what these bars had in 2008 - 2010. Actually, since there were twice as many bars in operation in 2008 - 2010, this means that the footfall today in all the existing bars combined is perhaps only a quarter of the traffic the entire industry had in those years. What we need are a couple more places with the easy-going atmosphere of Tawan, but differentiating themselves by having twinks, boys-next-door, etc so as not to compete directly against each other.

Here's a question for those who were recently in Dream Boy Bangkok. Outside of showtime, when the boys were on stage with their numbers pinned to their waists, were they in jeans, shorts or briefs? In July they were in jeans and some of us registered our protests with the mamasans. I'm wondering if they have changed their policy.

Just in on BBC: the eldest daughter of the Thai king, Princess Bajrakitiyabha, apparently collapsed and has been rushed to hospital. Few details so far, but the BBC correspondent points out the unusual statement describing her to be "stable to a certain extent". Some mention in the report about possible impact on succession, though obviously this is rather premature and speculative.

Wow. Great room for only 6148 baht!

If you can make your way to VCK or Sanctuary, that would be great. We haven't had reports from there in a long while. In fact I'm not even sure that Sanctuary is still operating. I have had great massages in Sanctuary, but that was years ago. As for VCK it is always on my secondary list, i.e. places I'd go to if I run out of places on my primary list... But I don't ever seem to exhaust my primary list, so I have not been to VCK in a very long while too. Have a great trip, though I suspect it's superfluous for me to say that. Of course you will!

Oh well, perhaps we should bear in mind that being farang does not necessarily mean they know anything about how to build a business....

The above having been said, there remains one thing I still cannot explain. Why two bars would try to out-scream each other. Maybe they've already contracted the gatoeys in advance for the night and cannot cancel, even when they discover that another bar is also putting up LE at the same hour? Would cancelling be an intolerable loss of face? Sometimes, we need to think like Thais to understand behaviour.

I think I've said it before in some other thread. This tendency to reach for loud 'entertainment' (LE for short) is a sign of failing business. It's when sales turnover is poor that the managers resort to LE, not realizing that it will only accelerate the loss of customers. WHy do managers resort to LE when sales are poor? Because in the villages where they come from, it works! In rural places, quiet is the default. Boredom is another. When a fair comes to town, its bright lights and thumping music draw people in. The louder the better so that people far away can hear that a fair is in town, and to relieve boredom, they make their way over. A low-key fair playing lounge music or soft jazz would be commercial suicide. These village boys now promoted to bar managers by absent owners don't know the first thing about business, marketing, branding, customer satisfaction, etc. Most of all, they don't know what they don't know: that customers from the rich urban world have different preferences and priorities from rural Thais.

Noise was what made me give up on staying in the Boyztown hotels many years ago. I have since always chosen Jomtien. In July, I noticed the same crazy noise from one or more Jomtien bars but fortunately I was staying in Zing Resort. I could still hear the noise in my room, but at that distance, it was muted enough to not be a problem. The following day, I met someone staying at the Venue, and he was livid.

The first photo showing the red shirt says 623 km away. Was there a reason why you thought he was nearer?

No doubt you are right, but it would be a bad idea to mix the slut me with the professional role I am supposed to play. Oh well.... While on this subject, and since I cannot resist a bit of gossip, he drove me to a simple roadside restaurant for lunch one day, and I invited him to eat with me. (It was more for my benefit than his, since I needed him close by to do the ordering). The three waitresses at the restaurant were nearly throwing themselves at him - he seemed to know them from before - and he had a hard time telling them to lay off. I don't understand what he said, but the body language indicated that he might have said, "My boss is watching". Not only was I watching, I was ready to shoot darts from my eyes. Lay off my driver! If anyone were to have him, it would be me!

Ah, this is important. As idyllic as Tien beach may look, staying overnight without a good signal would almost surely frustrate me. Guess I would have to stay in NaBaan. Others may have different priorities, of course.

This is a great, very useful trip report. One small question though: how was the cellphone signal while on the island? Thanks.

Of course there are many reasons why a departure is delayed, thus depriving an incoming flight of its assigned bay. But one possibility is that with a shortage of baggage handlers, loading the departing aircraft's luggage was taking longer than planned. The shortage/incompetence of a baggage operator can have numerous knock on effects.

What time of day was that? I must have been very, very lucky. I think someone else mentioned it before but this may not be the best course of action. The newly appointed contractor will not be able to produce the hundreds or thousands of replacement workers at a snap of a finger. Furthermore they need time to train the workers. What might be better would be to reduce the area of responsibility of the existing operator to something appropriate to the number of staff he has (e.g. 50% of flights) and give the remaining flights to the new operator. If necessary, get soldiers to do the job during the bridging period.