Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the difference between tourists and retirees in Thailand. I thought of making this video after reading a couple of recent comments on prior videos we made on this channel. Quoting directly: "It would be great if they had a 6-month Tourist Visa where you didn't have to leave the country. Maybe after 3 months you could go to Immigration to extend it for another 3 months. Better yet, just allow you to stay 6 months without having to deal with Immigration; make a fee of 250 US dollars for this type of Visa. Most tourists would come here to get away from winter in their home countries and usually stay five or six months and then head home." There was a second comment on this that says: "LOLs, the average stay is 10 days or so. Who has 6 months off besides retirees? It would take me 10 years to accumulate 6 months off and my company would go nuts if I took it all at once." Yeah there is kind of a point made in the subtext here, and I am not trying to point out anyone but there is more a subtextual point that I thought was worth noting which is, constantly I see these videos, not videos but comments and sort of people will talk to me and they will say well "why doesn't Thailand have Tourism Visa" at the end of the day that is kind of almost an attitude that seems to, like: "Why doesn't Thailand have a Tourist Visa that just lasts forever?" That seems to be kind of the underlying, the sort of sub-rosa if you will, message I hear when I hear that. The long short is Thailand doesn't want to do that, doesn't want to just let in a bunch of people that just live here forever without any good reason. They have their own economy to maintain, their own Nation state to maintain, that is just not how they are going to run things. 

Meanwhile, if you actually look at the way that the Visa exemption situation is in Thailand right now, which is basically look you can come in, get a 45-day stamp upon entry; you can extend that by 30 more days, well that's 75 days, that is two and a half months. And as we have discussed in other videos, there is a Royal Decree on this which basically stipulates that "yeah you can get two exemption stamps depending on your nationality", but pertaining to any of the English speakers basically watching this video, yeah anybody that is from the Anglosphere, maybe Europe, other countries, some parts of Eastern Europe as well that can come into Thailand and just get presently, temporarily at least, 45 days just on arrival and again there has been a Royal Decree to the effect that that those folks can enter twice a year and gain the same benefits. What's the upshot of this? Well if you look at it, 75 days plus 75 days is 150 days; I mean that is basically half a year. I mean it is a little shy of 180 days by about a month, but as the first commenter noted okay there are people that want to come here for five months. As it currently exists, that is possible to do on an exemption. Now yeah, you have got to do a few things to deal with Immigration to maintain status but yeah you can get 5 months in a relatively straightforward manner at the present time. 

Meanwhile as the second commenter noted, not a lot of folks have that amount of time for just a tourism excursion. That's not a real regular requirement of folks that want to be tourists in Thailand and this is kind of where you get into the differentiation between retirees that come here and may only spend perhaps half their year here in Thailand versus tourists who make try to come and spend a prolonged period of time but most of the time they have to be somewhere; they have got to get back to work usually and I think that the difference is worth mentioning hence the reason for the video. So again, there is a difference in mindset between tourists and retirees. For those retirees out here who do not necessarily spend all their time in Thailand in a given year, I do have to say especially at the present time, it is probably not a bad idea to look into getting a Retirement Visa if only to be in the system so that if there are major changes down the road, one sort of has their visa situation sort of locked up for those purposes.