Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Chinese agents for Thai visas. I am going to go ahead and quote an article from the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Chinese tour groups face more Visa hassles. I really urge those are watching this video go read that article in detail, a lot of good information and insight in there. I am going to quote a small excerpt here, quoting directly: Chinese tour operators will also face some added hurdles. The number of Visa applications will be limited daily to no more than 30 from authorized agents who, in turn must ensure that their warranty cards, (issued every two years by the Beijing Authorities) are valid and up to date. This is apparently causing processing delays as many Chinese Agent's cards expired during the no-travel pandemic with a backlog still waiting to be cleared." 

So for those foreigners, Farang, if you want to call them that, Anglosphere, Westerners, Europe or anywhere else for that matter, Central Europe, even South America yeah Thai Visas can be somewhat cumbersome at times to deal with but understand, different countries have different protocols they have to deal with and clearly the Thai Authorities in China are being pretty strict, going by the book with regard to Visa processing. Meanwhile, these Visa agencies in China I think are kind of a unique animal compared to other jurisdictions around the world because you have got a lot of people and basically these Visa agents are like bundlers, they take dozens if not hundreds of people, sort of bundle up all their applications and sort of try to run them through in bulk and that obviously is going to take up time and resources from a given Thai Embassy or Consulate where they are going to have less ability to efficiently process individuals who process their immigration case through that Consulate.

Meanwhile, something else to think about is look the zero-dollar scheme if you will is still fresh in Thai minds, wherein some years back we saw millions of Chinese tourists coming to Thailand every year and it was all set up in such a way that basically the Thai economy didn't benefit much from it; there were no tax revenues coming off of it and it caused the Thai Authorities to truly rethink certain protocols associated with Chinese tour groups. Again this has ramifications even up unto this moment as evidences by this article in and of itself. 

So the thing to understand and the thing to take away from this video is while I think Thailand welcomes Chinese tourism, they are pretty clear in the fact that they want folks to go through certain protocols. If you read in that article, there seems to be some encouragement of individual tourists, that individuals looking to come to Thailand from China would process a different way. They may have other options for example a standard Tourist Visa or visa-on-arrival whereas folks coming with these tour groups, they are going to get a little bit more scrutiny and they are going to get a little bit more scrutiny because of again the history again with the Zero-dollar scheme going back a few years ago. Then meanwhile, yeah on top of that I think there is a genuine concern that hey, not everybody is travelling in a bulk tour group. We want to be able to preserve some of our resources when it comes to visa processing for individuals who process through our Embassies and Consulates as opposed to just basically having all of those resources saturated purely by folks going through Visa Agents.