Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Certificates of Entry. This is definitely a topic that has been on the lips of many folks especially those trying to get into Thailand. It has also being the topic of a lot of consternation amongst folks, a lot of frustration from this.

A recent article from The Telegraph, that is telegraph.co.uk, the article in my opinion a little bit of hyperbole but perhaps not much, the article is titled: Thailand: the country with the most complicated entry restrictions on Earth and the byline is: Holidays to Thailand are back but they aren't straightforward. Quoting directly: "Be warned that required "Certificate of Entry" is more extensive than the Passenger Locator Forms you may be used to, requiring applicants to upload travel insurance details, vaccination proof, testing payment proof, hotel reservations, plane tickets and passport details." I will get to passport details in a minute; that is kind of an understatement. Quoting further: "A quick internet search reveals angry Travelers describing the form as "complicated", with one Facebook user saying they "gave up". Yeah, I am sure you can probably find some quotes of consternation in the comment section below some of these videos on Certificates of Entry. We have definitely seen a lot of feedback and correspondence and things. Yeah, I get it, Certificates of Entry are far more cumbersome than they were even a year ago quite frankly. In a way, not to get too far off into kind of an op-ed here, but I think we have kind of gotten into an area of what I would call sort of "bureaucratic mission creep". COEs, they arguably had a function when this started I guess. It created an extra "line of defense" if you will. That said, there could have been other ways to do this. In my opinion, the COE process seems unnecessarily cumbersome to me but okay we are dealing with it, that is what we have to deal with. On top of that, look there are other systems not to say they are particularly great. The ESTA system in the United States, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, we have got that in the States. I am not a huge fan of that system frankly either. I think the Visa waiver program was fine before that came along but here we are. The same can be said I think for COE's

Now, that said, they talk in here about passport details. Yeah that has proven to be the source of a lot of frustration for us dealing with these things. Some of these Embassies want different types of photos of passports, different types of copies of passports; it has proven to be a real frustrating thing to deal with. I can tell you one of the Immigration Attorneys here in our office who deals with this pretty much daily, and in fact has been getting COE's since basically the day they were available, we were assisting folks in getting those going all the way back into mid-April of 2020, it is a cumbersome process. It is Byzantine by anyone's estimation, anybody that has ever dealt with any bureaucracy, I would say even full on bureaucrats would say that yeah it is a nightmare in certain ways and passport details are one of those. 

Now hopefully I think it is possible this could go away. In fact I think it could go away sooner rather than later although exactly when remains to be seen mostly because I think it is going to deter a lot of Tourism. As noted in this article that I quoted from and on top of that just from a lot of feedback I have seen online, tourists just don't really want to go through all of this hassle just to get to some place to relax. Try explaining that to somebody who is like a career bureaucrat and just thinks forms are for consumption, they are part of life or something. I don't think this is here to stay and I think as the situation evolves, we will probably see this get phased out. Now again, exactly when remains to be seen.