Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing a "Tourist Tax". Someone sent me an email with a link to the article I am going to cite here in a moment and they basically said, "Hey, have you seen this new "tourist tax"? And they just basically put it in quotes and question mark, I think they were being funny but I decided to go ahead and use it in the title here.

The article they cited was from Bangkok Post, that is bangkokpost.com. The article is titled: Cases must Drop for Sandbox Scheme. Quoting directly and this is a small excerpt, the rest of the article doesn't really have a lot to do with this but I urge those to go check out that article, there is a lot of information in there but this I thought was interesting. Quoting directly: "The Government is also planning to initiate a plan to collect 300 baht from foreign tourists starting next January to set up a tourism fund for emergency use." So again January 2022 it looks like it is not going to be dissimilar from the so called airport tax. They have discussed this off and on; this was actually brought up as I recall when they were discussing insurance coverage, maybe like 18 months ago, and it seemed to have been dropped at the time. They were going to put this on tourists coming in and have this fund where if people got sick in the Kingdom, maybe that is what they are doing here again. It is probably not as terrible idea if they do; I am probably going to get burned on this video for saying it is not a terrible idea. I have my issues with it but they may be trying to do some cost-benefit analysis where they are maybe a little bit afraid that people coming in to Thailand and they could overwhelm the Healthcare System and something they are trying to mitigate or offset the costs associated with that. I don't know. I don't know exactly what the policy thinking behind this is. I can see arguments in favour of it, I can definitely see arguments not in favour of it especially if you are looking to encourage tourism, especially after hopefully we get to the light at the end of this pretty mundane and for lack of a better term, terrible tunnel with respect to tourism because we are is going on at least here in Thailand, we are basically at a full year now with virtually no tourism or very, very truncated numbers compared to those that were in existence in quarter one of 2020 and prior to that time.

Hopefully they are going to do what they can to encourage tourism. I do think everybody involved is doing their best and is operating in a good faith effort to get tourism back. The tourism industry has had a heck of a time. It remains to be seen if this will be fully implemented but we will certainly keep folks updated on this channel as the situation evolves.