The few travellers who sit in Khao San's street-front bars, enjoying a cool beer in the hot afternoon, will retreat to their nearby hotels by 9 p.m. when the curfew is enforced by soldiers.
Occupancy rates in the budget hotels have plummeted from a normal 80 percent to, at best, 10 percent. The Viengtai Hotel has 205 rooms but only 13 are occupied with 23 tourists.
The nearby Khaosan Park Resort is the same.
Each day the Viengtai Hotel receives cancellations, sometimes as many as 10, as people are still wary of coming to Bangkok, despite calm returning to the city after troops put down a nine-week protest on Wednesday.
The military crackdown killed at least 15 people and wounded nearly 100. A total of 53 people have died and 415 been wounded since the unrest flared on May 14.
"It's very bad," said Viengtai Hotel receptionist Warapha Noirod. "We have bookings, but they are cancelling."
The hotel's staff have seen their commission on bookings cut from around 3,000 baht ($93) a month to 1,000 baht and fear next month's commission may be as low as 800 baht.
The protests have decimated Thai tourism, which accounts for 6 percent of GDP and employs 15 percent of the workforce, and could have a significant impact on growth in Southeast Asia's second-largest economy, says Finance Minister Korn Chatikavanij.
Surapol Sritrakul, president of the Association of Thai Travel Agents (ATTA), expects foreign arrivals of 12-13 million people this year, down from 14.5 million in 2009.
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