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Mass Tourism in Thailand Unlikely Until March 2021?
Transcript of the above video:
As the title suggests, we are discussing mass tourism in Thailand. The definition of mass tourism in Thailand I think first of all we need to set the definition for that which is basically numbers for tourism of the type that we saw prior to the March response to COVID-19. The Emergency Decree, the Immigration lockdown, the suspension of 30-day stamps, suspension of visa-on-arrival; so we are looking at a reversion if you will to the situation prior to that time.
A recent article from Thai Visa, thaivisa.com article is titled: Thailand to Remain Closed to Mass Tourism Until March, Travel Bubble Discussions Ongoing. Quoting directly: "The prospect of Thailand's borders remaining closed to most foreigners until March will come as a further blow to Thailand's beleaguered Tourism Industry." I am not going to quote any further from that. There is a lot of information in that article. I urge you to go check it out.
A question that has been posed to me based on this article, folks have asked me, they have asked: "Do I think that that is likely that March is probably the earliest we might see that?" I would say that is a pretty fair assessment. By assessment I mean again seeing anything akin to the system as it was prior to the COVID response in March. So anything akin to 30-day stamps, anything akin to visas-on-arrival, perhaps the repeal of the need for the Certificate of Entry; any of that I think you are probably looking at a situation where March is going to be the earliest where we are possibly going to see that. I think that is probably for a host of reasons most notably I think vaccinations are probably going to play into that or the availability thereof I should say. Many other factors are going to play into that but March I think yeah probably not until then although I have seen credible sources that continue to talk about the possibility of at least some relaxation of visa rules with respect to the time frame around Chinese New year which is late January early February of 2021. Again that remains to be seen.
That being said we are talking about mass tourism so we are talking about the reimplementation or the repeal of the suspension of 30-day exemption stamps, visas-on-arrival or maybe even you can maybe say included in that terminology would be the repeal of the need for a Certificate of Entry. I think March at the earliest before we would see any of those developments come to pass.