Smiling Gecko Educational Campus
LIGHT AND SHADOW AT THE FARMHOUSE RESORT
Over the past twelve months, an impressive array of companies and organisations have visited the Farmhouse Resort and campus for corporate social responsibility (CSR) events and activities, including Etihad Airways, Honda, Menarini Asia Pacific, V-ZUG, GIZ and UNIDO.
They are all more than welcome here. We greatly appreciate every CSR programme that engages with us, and these partnerships also help to improve the resort’s occupancy, which has been less than satisfactory. Notably the resort has won several awards again this year.
Cambodian tourism continues to be in a fragile recovery phase, to put it mildly.
Even the Cambodian government, which is usually very optimistic in its communications, reports a decline in international arrivals of over 5% for the first eight months of 2025. It can also be assumed that the actual number of travellers is well below official figures. European individual travellers, who traditionally make up a significant proportion of our guests, are currently travelling to Cambodia less frequently.
Reasons for this include border conflicts, a weaker global economy, and a shift in demand towards more heavily advertised destinations, such as Vietnam and Thailand. A clear indicator of weak overall demand is the decline in visitor numbers to the Angkor Archaeological Park which recorded significantly fewer guests in 2024 and the first months of 2025 than before the pandemic. As Angkor Wat is the main attraction for many travellers to Cambodia, this decline clearly reflects waning international interest.
Despite the less-than-encouraging short-term outlook, the Farmhouse remains our largest and most important training facility. For this reason alone, we will continue to do everything we can to appeal to as many target groups as possible worldwide. One focus will be on creating individually tailored offers for the business guests mentioned earlier. In addition, in 2026, we will launch a programme for people who want to work on our campus for a few days or weeks, but who also want the comforts of a hotel. We will provide more information on this in the first newsletter of the new year.
