Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing kind of an opinion piece here. Just my thoughts on this current how do you want to call it, theme that seems to be rolling around the internet that we are moving toward a pretty broad reopening coming November 1, 2021. The point I want to make in this video, my thoughts on this are having gone through everything we went through back in April, that was on a major level very disappointing and more than that I think it was economically really devastating. I think long term, even short term I think that the way things played out in April, and this is not me here trying to play the blame game. There are a lot of folks that send me emails and things and they think I am critical of Thailand out of some level of cynicism or me just wanting to complain about Thailand. That is really not the case. I love Thailand. The reason for my comments, the reason I get kind of worked up about things is because I love Thailand and I just want what is best for the country and especially a lot of the folks that I see day to day that are really struggling especially economically as a result of these policies that have resulted in all these shutdowns and just major economic drag on the country.

Getting back to the point, back in April we went into a scenario where if I recall right the first couple of weeks of April they brought down quarantine from 14 days to 7 days and it stayed that way for a few days; it wasn't very long, if it was a week I'd be surprised. Then they very quickly reinstituted 14-day quarantine and then on top of that, we went into the non-lockdown as they called it at the time, which was everything a lockdown has minus the name and then stayed in that state for months and it was, my opinion I question the necessity of it and it was really bad for the economy. More importantly and the point of this video, that flip, that quick policy change from “okay we are down to 7-Day quarantine back to 14 days” very quickly, in my opinion that really detrimentally impacted confidence of tourists looking to come into Thailand. We come into October, we have gone back down to a 7-Day quarantine, I don't think that that is fully appreciated my folks out there in the ether of the internet if you will because we are now back to where we were in April and that is something to be applauded but we are looking at coming online fully in kind of a broad re-opening not just the “sandboxes” but you know Bangkok and yeah there are going to be different rules for folks coming in and everything, but Bangkok, presumably Hua Hin, Pattaya, Chiang Mai a bunch of different places are looking to re-open with dramatically decreased restrictions and quarantine time frames and things. If we are going to do this, I think we really need to stick with it. To think that we can flip the switch off and on or something when this thing reopens, I think it is going to be bad policy all around because I think it had a really detrimental impact. It is not anybody's fault. It just was what it was but I think it had a really detrimental impact on confidence of prospective tourists and I really don't want to see that happen again because I think if it happens again it would be exponentially worse this time than it was back in April of 2021.