About 25 passengers landed at Phuket International Airport Thursday on a direct flight from Abu Dhabi.
It was the first of four international flights scheduled to arrive, carrying around 400 immunized tourists from Qatar, Israel, Singapore and United Arab Emirates as part of Thailand's new "Phuket Sandbox" program.
For the first time in more than a year, Thailand's popular resort island of Phuket is allowing immunized foreign visitors to enter without quarantine restrictions.
Thailand is moving ahead with proposals to jump-start its tourism industry by reopening Phuket to inoculated travelers - even as the contagious Covid-19 Delta variant sweeps through the region.
If Thailand's "Sandbox" experiment proves successful, it could set the stage to a wider reopening of the southeast Asian country's tourism sector as soon as October.
"It's the start of the reopening of Thailand's tourism sector in the new normal," Thaneth Tantipiriyakij, president of the Tourism Council of Phuket, according to Bloomberg News.
"We'll gradually reopen and continuously learn from it to chart the course for tourism to become one of the country's key economic engines again," Tantipiriyakij said.
But local companies, who felt they've been left behind, aren't excited about the trickles of tourists set to arrive Thursday.
"They'll see buildings for rent, shops and convenience stores closed. Do you think it's a good environment for tourists? No," Srangsan Thongtan of the Phuket Tourism Entrepreneur Development Association said, according to Channel News Asia.
Thailand Minister of Tourism Phiphat Ratchakitprakarn said the Phuket Sandbox was necessary to revive the country's economy.
"In 2019, we had revenue from both local and international tourism at 3 trillion baht ($93.7 billion) but last year it shrank to 800 billion baht," Ratchakitprakarn told CNN in an interview on the eve of the reopening.
More than 2 million Thailand tourism employees have been jobless since 2020 - including 400,000 in the first quarter of 2021, an industry group said this week.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-Ocha is upbeat. "Phuket is on a national mission to pave the way for the country to reopen. The whole country is closely watching. We can't fail."
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