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Tour Guide to Remain an Occupation Restricted to Thais in Thailand

Transcript of the above video:

In this video today, we're going to be talking about recent announcements from the Prime Minister himself with respect to tour guide operators here in the Kingdom of Thailand. Now another video on this channel, we went ahead and discussed a recent discussion of revising the labor restrictions here in Thailand to allow foreigners to go ahead and engage in certain activities that heretofore have been considered restricted to Thai nationals only.

In in this video, we're going to be discussing some developments surrounding the tourism industry specifically tour operators in Thailand. And to quote directly from a Bangkok Post article, the article’s headline is “PM toughens on tour guides” published 17th of July 2017. To quote directly, “the government has vowed to continue cracking down on illegal tour guides and foreigners illegally operating tour guide services saying the job is reserved for Thai nationals only.”

To further quote and quoting directly from Mr. Prayut, “the government doesn't have a policy allowing foreigners to come work as tour guides in Thailand because the role of professional tour guide is one reserved for Thai nationals only under the 1999 law on business operations of foreigners General Prayut said Sunday. And to further quote that same article, “as of June 30th, only 70,655 tour guides have registered with the Department of Tourism.”

So what are we talking about with respect to this? Well, there was some discussion as to the possibility that foreign nationals could go ahead and engage in tour activities when the discussion came up with respect to revision of the labor code here. It was bandied about that you know foreign nationals are going to have a better grasp with their mother-tongue. So you know, to be able to get a tour guide who speaks fluent - not surprised them too out of the ordinary but to find a tour guide who say spoke fluent Italian would probably be somewhat difficult to find here in the Kingdom or maybe Portuguese for that matter.

It's possible to find someone that could do that. I'm sure that there are individuals who can. But that being said, some of the more obscure languages I think it was discussed that maybe perhaps you know allowing foreigners to do that would be a good idea. That caught some almost immediate stiff resistance from organizations such as the Tourism Authority here in Thailand etc and it taught the flack because Thais are pretty serious about maintaining or the Thai people generally seem to be pretty serious about maintaining tourism operation as a Thai only activity. And from Prime Minister General Prayut’s comments, this only seems to be reinforced by those comments.

So I think it's fairly safe to assume that it's not going to be possible as a foreign national to engage in what could be described tourism or tourists operator, you know tour guide operations here in the Kingdom anytime soon.