Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing longer lines for Thai Visa Extensions. Fact of the matter is one of the upshots of seeing Thailand reopen and certainly seeing all the lovely tourists arriving and bringing all their foreign money and bringing in all these good times we are currently seeing in the tourism sector and we certainly appreciate all of you, thank you for coming to Thailand; great to have you here, love to see the tourists but one of the big upshots of this is look we are going to see some ramifications from this at Immigration Offices.

I personally, we deal with Thai Immigration Division 1 here in Bangkok probably on a daily basis. I see or maybe have some tangential dealings with Immigration down in Pattaya, down in Jomtien a couple of times a month, again tangentially. We have got clients that do business kind of down there, and we may need to deal with that office from time to time. Yeah look there are just more people here so the lines are getting longer which brings me to a recent article from the Pattaya Mail, pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Pattaya Immigration Bureau seas return of pre-pandemic numbers. Quoting directly: "The reintroduction of charter flights from Russia to Rayong airport (U-tapao) has boosted numbers to Pattaya as well as new and expanded international routes to the main airports in Bangkok. Most new customers were seeking to register their local address (form TM 30) or to apply for extensions of stay." Yeah I have got to imagine there's probably a large number of extenders especially in the tourism category that are standing in line much more than they were in the past. 

Now up here in Bangkok as we have discussed, they are bringing online this E-extension platform where it's going to be possible to deal with this online. As a practical matter, my staff that deal with Immigration on a daily basis have told me “we are not really seeing any dwindling of the amount of people we are seeing in line for that”. Now something to also keep in mind is I would kind of doubt although if folks have any observations on this I would really be happy to hear it in the comments, I'm kind of curious what people think, but is it only tourist extensions that we are seeing a lot of numbers on because I would imagine we probably aren't going to start seeing a lot of Non-Immigrant extensions or at least a substantial number, maybe with the exception of retirees, but I don't see where a ton of new Business Visa Extensions are just popping up overnight. I think it's going to take a little more time to see lines in the Non-Immigrant Visa section really start to expand out. Frankly the lines with respect to those even during the pandemic didn't really massively diminish. I mean you had people that were living in Thailand still needing to deal with their Visa status and they did it, they dealt with that just as they always had. So we didn't really see this massive deflation in the demand for ongoing extension status, at least in the part of our firm that deals with Non-Immigrant Visa Extensions. So I am kind of curious to know who exactly is extending. Again I expect there is probably more retirees than there were before and then coupled with the number that were already here, but I imagine the bulk of this is Tourist Visa Extensions.