Under the plan, private companies will be given grants totaling 500 million baht (HK$93.5 million) for marketing and advertising focused on luring back Japanese, Chinese and Korean tourists, whose numbers have declined sharply. ''Asian tourists are scared of ghosts and what not, and these are factors that have made our tourist arrivals drop short of our goal,'' said Tourism Minister Somsak Thepsuthin.

Many Asians worry that the ghosts of the disaster victims may be haunting beaches and bungalows. A popular superstition in Chinese societies holds that if bodies are not recovered and properly buried, the spirits restlessly wander the world. Some believe the lost souls try to drag living beings into their spiritual limbo land.

The government is running short of its target to attract 13.3 million visitors to the country in 2005, due mainly to a drop in tourists at the tsunami-hit southern coast.

``We've fallen short of the target for the first half of the year by about 1.9 million tourists,'' Somsak said. ``We have to make an intensive public relations campaign to let tourists know that the tsunami hit only some areas, not the entire country.''

The December 26 tsunami killed nearly 5,400 people in Thailand, about half of them foreign tourists.

In Phuket, the resort most affected by the disaster, only 29,441 tourists arrived during the first half of the year - about 62 percent less than last year, according to the Phuket airport immigration office. Thailand earned tourism revenue of about 400 billion baht last year, or 6 percent of the country's gross domestic product, according to the Tourism Authority of Thailand.