Editorial note

General research for information only — not legal, tax, or investment advice. Cambodian law and markets change; figures are indicative, so verify current detail with a qualified local professional before you act.

A meaningful share of Cambodian property only works if visitors keep arriving: Siem Reap’s hospitality stock, the coastal condo market, the short-stay slice of Phnom Penh. Yet tourism numbers are usually quoted in property marketing the way weather is — sunny, always improving. The actual data is lumpier, and 2025 was the year that proved it. Here is how to read the visitor economy the way you would read any other demand series: by segment, by source market, and against the asset you are actually buying.

The 2025 shock, plainly

International arrivals fell 16.9 percent in 2025, to 5.57 million — driven by the Thai border conflict, which cut Thai arrivals roughly in half (−52.4 percent) [S-099]. One land border dispute removed the largest single source market almost overnight. That is the structural lesson before any trend analysis: Cambodian tourism demand is concentrated and politically sensitive, and a property underwritten on it inherits that volatility.

The same year carried the offsetting signal: Chinese arrivals rose 41.5 percent [S-099]. The China channel — the one Cambodian property has historically depended on most — was re-opening even as the Thai one closed. Both facts are true at once; honest analysis holds both.

Update, August 2026: the decline deepened rather than reversed. First-half 2026 international arrivals fell 47.9 percent, to 1.75 million, against 3.36 million in the same period of 2025 — a sharper drop than the full 2025 figure, not a recovery from it. The government attributes the compounding slide to negative publicity, scam-network fallout, continued Thai-border friction, and Middle East-driven fuel costs [S-098]. The lesson above holds more, not less: this is still a concentrated, politically sensitive demand series, and it is currently trending the wrong way.

Arrivals are not the number your asset feels

The subtler trap is using national arrivals as a proxy for demand at a specific asset. Siem Reap is the proof case. National arrivals had recovered to roughly three-quarters of pre-pandemic totals by 2024 [S-029] — yet Angkor’s ticketed visitation still ran at less than half its 2019 level, with early-2025 ticket sales tracking more than 50 percent below the same months of 2019 [S-030]. Chinese ticketed visitors collapsed from hundreds of thousands in 2019 to some 43,000 in 2025 — a ~$16 million revenue hole on its own [S-030].

Arrivals counted at the border include workers, traders, and transit; the visitor who fills a Siem Reap boutique room or a coastal short-stay unit is a narrower series. When a brochure quotes national arrivals to justify a tourism-linked purchase, ask for the number the asset actually monetises: ticketed park entries, airport passengers, occupancy in the relevant class. Our Siem Reap guide walks that gap in detail.

Update, September 2026: the Angkor-specific series, now eight months deep, is the more relevant read than the national figure above. Angkor Archaeological Park drew 474,993 foreign visitors from January through August 2026, per state-owned Angkor Enterprise data reported September 3 — a 29.07 percent year-on-year decline — with ticket revenue over the same eight months topping $22.5 million, down 27.43 percent [S-115]. An earlier September 1 Khmer Times report on the same official release cited a nearly identical 474,933 visitors and a rounded 30 percent / 27 percent decline [S-116]; the small gap between the two is a rounding or reporting-cut artifact, not a revision, and the September 3 figures above are the more precise ones to cite.

The one genuinely useful signal inside the eight-month total: August alone brought 46,770 foreign visitors and $2.21 million in revenue, down 8.02 percent and 8.47 percent respectively year-on-year [S-115] — a materially smaller decline than the roughly 29 percent run rate for the year to date. That is a deceleration, not a recovery: visitor numbers are still falling, just by less than earlier in the year. Whether August marks the start of a genuine stabilisation or a one-month wobble is not answerable from a single month — the next two or three Angkor Enterprise releases will tell you which. Khiev Thy, president of the Angkor Tour Guide Association, said the decline is hitting tourism businesses and frontline workers in Siem Reap directly [S-116] — the on-the-ground read that tracks the ticketed-visitor series better than any national arrivals figure would.

For Siem Reap property specifically, this Angkor series is the more relevant demand signal than the national H1 2026 arrivals figure cited above: eight straight months of a double-digit decline, decelerating but still negative, is the number to underwrite against — not the hope that one better month means the setback is over.

How tourism exposure differs by market

  • Siem Reap is a near-pure tourism bet: the central question is your view on visitor numbers over your holding period, and 2025 was a setback year, not a recovery year [S-099] [S-030]. Sized correctly, it is a deliberate operator’s bet — not passive income.
  • The coast layers tourism demand on top of an unresolved supply overhang — Sihanoukville’s stalled-tower legacy [S-034] — so even a genuine visitor recovery deploys into heavy competing stock. See Phnom Penh vs Sihanoukville.
  • Phnom Penh is the least exposed: its rental base is expatriate and corporate rather than touristic, which is why the capital’s yield arithmetic moves on oversupply and occupancy, not on arrivals.

Sizing a tourism-linked bet

Three disciplines, none exotic:

  1. Underwrite the segment series, not the national one — ticketed entries or airport passengers for Siem Reap; occupancy in the asset’s own class for the coast [S-029] [S-030].
  2. Stress the top source market. 2025’s Thai collapse showed a single market can halve overnight [S-099]; run your numbers with the largest source market cut in half and see if the asset still services itself.
  3. Treat infrastructure as an option, not a forecast. New airports and corridors can move visitor flows — but Cambodia’s record of announced-versus-built argues for pricing what exists, as our infrastructure analysis lays out.

Tourism is a real, recovering demand engine — and the most volatile one in Cambodian property. Buy it deliberately and sized, or buy the expat-and- corporate demand of the capital instead. The mistake is buying the volatility while believing the brochure’s weather report.

Sources

Rc
Research Cambodia
Research Cambodia · Independent editorial research

Our research answers to readers, not developers. It starts from what Cambodian law and the data actually support, and states the downside as plainly as the upside. Corrections are made in public.