Transcript of the above video: 

I hesitated to call this an ALERT because I think it would only pertain to a relatively narrow subset of foreigners. That said, I think it has enough gravity that the label is warranted because those who are engaging in this activity either knowingly or unknowingly, wittingly or unwittingly, even inadvertently or inadvertently, could find themselves in real problems so that's the reason for the desire to get some attention to this particular post because I think that there are some folks out there, probably innocently, they are not maliciously trying to operate against relevant Thai Law but there are foreigners out there who think that what they are doing is legal when in reality, again due to the nature of the restricted occupations here in Thailand and the restrictions on foreigners ability to work in certain occupations in Thailand, those folks may not be aware of that and it could have some rather dire consequences. Let me get into what I'm talking about.

So I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Unwelcome rebirth of zero-dollar tours. Just for some background here, the notion of a "zero-dollar" tour, this came about some years back. I want to say it's been within a decade, I want to say sometime within about 7 or 10 years ago we saw this come to the forefront sort of in the news and it was pretty big news for a while and it had pretty dire results for the folks that were involved. Basically zero-dollar tourism is where offshore foreigners or foreign tour companies will book these large package tours, large groups of people to come to Thailand and they will keep all the money offshore and not bring it into Thailand and then they will bring the people to Thailand and do their thing and really not spend any money here. It was the cause of a great deal of consternation some years back especially because it was viewed as something of a circumvention of relevant Thai Tax Laws and as a result, again going back you can read the articles, Bangkok Post is probably a good archive to go find those articles about the zero-dollar tours. Yeah, Thai Police went after people over that. They actually arrested people. I remember one person I believe who ran one of the operations actually ended up in jail for a while. So this is not something to take lightly. 

Quoting directly: "The longer this kind of business persists, the worse the Thai Tourism Industry will become", he said, and he being Sisdivachr Cheewarattanaporn President of the Association of Thai Travel Agents (ATTA). Quoting further: "Many Thai operators with licenses have adapted their business to serve only incentive groups or leisure tourists, rather than looking for volume, said Mr. Sisdivachr. Arresting one or two illegal tour operators will not be enough he said. The relevant authorities should dissolve the whole network as each operator normally branches out to at least four or five businesses, said Mr. Sisdivachr. He said ATTA, as part of the Federation of Thai Tourism Associations is hoping to meet with Tourism and Sports Minister Sermsak Pongpanit shortly to discuss the matter." 

Now I have to imagine if there is a discussion at the Ministerial level there will probably be ramifications. Again I can't say that for certain but again this is the point of the ALERT. If you are a foreigner and you are operating in the tourism sector, you need to be leery of that because there is a good chance, in fact there's a very high probability you're operating illegally, you are operating outside of the restricted occupations, or you are operating in contravention of the restricted occupations list notwithstanding the existence of a Work Permit. Bear that in mind. Just because one may have a Work Permit doesn't mean you can operate in restricted occupations here in Thailand. 

So what to take away from this video? If you are operating in this and you are a foreigner, you probably want to get your ducks in a row at the very least and it may not be a terrible idea to rethink your career move in general about being in the tourism sector here, again because it is restricted exclusively to Thais. So how exactly this will play out remains to be seen. We will certainly keep people updated on this channel as the situation evolves.