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Are Thai O Retirement Visa Holders Truly "Stranded" Abroad?
Transcript of the above video:
As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the O Retirement Visa. Specifically the O Retirement Visa, I want to be clear as opposed to the O–A Retirement Visa. I have made other videos on this channel. We have discussed this at length.
Presently at least as of the time of the making of this video, O Retirement Visa holders are not permitted to return to Thailand. Meanwhile in many countries O-A retirees are being allowed to file for and ultimately be issued Certificates of Entry to come back to Thailand. This raises the question with a lot of folks and we have done some videos comparing the two, the O versus the O-A, and talking about folks that are currently unable to re-enter Thailand notwithstanding the fact they have an O Visa. It was issued for retirement purposes but it was an extension of stay generally speaking, inside of Thailand. It sort of begs the question "Are folks truly stranded abroad if they have an O Retirement Visa?" Well Yes in the sense that they cannot use their O Retirement Visa to re-enter Thailand, but No in the sense that in my opinion it may be possible, it may not be the most easy thing in the world but it may be possible, to go ahead and apply for an O-A Retirement Visa, meet the criteria for that Visa which are similar to the Retirement Visa criteria with one major difference being the having of insurance. So people that enter Thailand in O-A status are going to need to affirmatively have gained insurance coverage specifically for COVID-19 but there are also other coverage requirements associated with the O-A Visa. An O retiree is presumably of age for an O-A visa and so long as they can get the insurance requirement covered and they can deal with the financial requirements associated with the O-A, they should be able to return to Thailand.
Now my heart truly goes out. There are going to be folks that it looks like may be ineligible for certain types of insurance coverage. There may be folks that may not be able to meet certain aspects of the financial requirements although if they can meet it for the O Retirement Visa presumably they should be able to meet it for the O-A Visa. That stated, I do know there are people that have been substantially displaced in all of this and I truly do sympathize; it is one of the reasons we are trying to make these videos.
The thing to understand though is "yes, insurance is required for the O-A." I know a lot of folks, I see a lot of folks that are presuming they may not be covered. It may be a good idea to contact a legal professional in order to figure out if in fact there may be insurance coverage that you are not seeing. Again it is going to be circumstantially dependent and also it may be possible for those who are currently abroad in O Retirement status, to go ahead and get an O-A Visa to return to Thailand.