Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, it appears that this might be a ‘ding dong, the witch is gone” moment as my kid says because she learned the song, kind of a toned down, you can't say the Witch Is Dead, the Witch is Gone, whatever, but it looks like at least temporarily we may be seeing a delay of the Electronic Travel Authorization here in Thailand. 

I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Online TM6 form for visitors to Thailand coming on May 1. Now that article goes in a different direction than what we are talking about here. And I urge those you who are watching this video, go check that out. I've done other videos that are being released contemporaneously with this one where I get into the TM 6 system. The important point here though is this grand plan by Ministry of Foreign Affairs some roughly 6 months ago, call it 8 months ago now, that had to do with the DTV and rolling out all of this digital stuff and sort of had their own ideas on how the Immigration System worked. I said at the time, it didn't make a lot of sense because Interior deals with Immigration here in Thailand, and internally it didn't seem like the same message was coming out of Interior basically; it didn't seem like they were reading from the same sheet of music sort of thing. 

That said, I think we've got some further clarification on this, at least for the minute. "Mongkon Wimonrat, the Ministry's Deputy Permanent Secretary, said the Government would prioritize the digital TM6 before adopting other types of entry screening planned earlier to prevent confusion among tourists." Quoting further, and this is where sort of you get into the meat of being able to analyze something here: "Implementing another pre-screening measure, such as an electronic travel authorization," - those words are being used specifically here in the English language paper of record - that said, again: "..such as an electronic travel authorization," quoting further: "which some countries have used to enable Visa-free travelers to gain approval prior to arriving in the country, would also be delayed to pave the way for the online TM6 process to operate smoothly." So, as I asked in another video, does this mean the end of the DTV? Now we don't know for sure on that one; I get into the analysis of that in another video.

That said, for purposes of this video, what you need to understand is what they have explicitly pointed out in this article is it looks like at least the Electronic Travel Authorization itself is going to be delayed.