Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are asking the question, how many days should one stay outside of Thailand on a Border Run? What are we talking about when we talk about a Border Run?  Well for me I delineate two types of "Run" if you will. There's a Visa Run and there's a Border Run. A border run in my opinion is when you go to the Border simply to cross the border, cross back in, and then thereby through whatever means or mechanism, regain further lawful status in the Kingdom by dint of re-entering. So you leave, you are stamped out, you are stamped back in and then your new stamp reflects your new lawful status here in the Kingdom. I view this as different than what I would call a Visa Run. A Visa Run is when a person leaves Thailand, goes to an Embassy or Consulate abroad, gets a new visa and then comes back to Thailand. Those are two different things. 

Now I thought of making this video after receiving a recent email, and I have got to tell you folks, I don't really like receiving emails like this. It just says: "Hi, for an air Border Run, how many days should you expect out of Thailand?" Then just thanks, and their name. Look, we are a law firm at the end of the day. If you have inquiries, feel free to send them. I'm not going to always sort of answer these questions on this channel when I get emails like that, but honestly, it's not the best advice to send just an email that says, "hey how long can I do this?" Send us an email, ask us what you want to do, and we will try to figure it out.

That said, this is kind of one of those questions I prefer to answer on the channel and it's probably due to the answer because I haven't talked about this in a while, because quite frankly, we get these questions quite frequently. That being said, the question posed is "For an air Border Run, how many days should you stay out of Thailand?" Well, I can pretty much generally answer the question, Land, Air and Sea with this. It depends on your circumstances; I know I sound like a broken record but what are you coming and going on? Are you in Thailand on a Visa Exemption Stamp and you're looking to just turn around in the same day and try to have lawful status again? That may or may not be possible. Most of the Border checkpoints to the best of my knowledge, are now requiring at least a day or two outside with regard to Land Border Runs specifically. 

That being said, I don't know if this is sort of permeating into the air border-run checkpoints, the Immigration checkpoints at airports throughout Thailand. That being said, again your underlying facts will generally dictate at least how you are viewed coming back through the checkpoint. So, what am I talking about? For example, if you have an extended Non-Immigrant Visa here in Thailand, so a B Visa, O Visa, O-A, Marriage Visa, whatever, or Retirement Visa under the O or O-A category, and you're looking to leave and come back in, for whatever reason, and I don't know why that would be, you don't really need to do a Border Run, but you can just come and go on that Visa the same day no problem. Meanwhile again Visa Exemption status, it depends on the discretion of the Border checkpoint at the time you are going through it. 

Meanwhile, as we have discussed in other videos, they are talking about this Destination Thailand Visa in language that in my opinion is probably not in line with the reality of the situation; that being said, it remains to be seen exactly how Border Running is going to work with those visas as they were just invented and we haven't seen how they work to the duration of their first 180 days which we will start seeing that in quarter one or quarter two of 2025. 

That being said, again to just sort of reiterate, look everybody's going to be different. Again, with the Visa Exemption status, how many times have you been in Thailand in this given year? If it looks like you're living here on a Tourist Visa or an exemption status, I expect the DTV probably will have very similar sort of scrutiny applied to it as well. In that case, in that situation, it's going to depend on the Officer, again the facts of the case, are you trying to do multiple exemptions? Exactly what are you doing? That will be what determines how long they want to see you outside the Kingdom of Thailand.