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ResourcesVisa & Immigration LawVisa NewsAutomatic Thai Visa Extensions Due to Coronavirus (COVID-19) Announced

Automatic Thai Visa Extensions Due to Coronavirus (COVID-19) Announced

Transcript of the above video:

During this Coronavirus outbreak that we have been dealing with, there has been a lot of "not-so-good news".  There is some good news being brought here in this video to folks who are currently for lack of better term "stranded" in Thailand; those tourists who came to Thailand and sort of inadvertently got stuck here. 

In a recent article from the Nation, that is nationthailand.com, the article is titled:  Tourists get Automatic Visa Extensions. Quoting directly:  "Deputy Ministry Spokesman Natapanu Nopakun said the cabinet has responded with a move to grant automatic renewal of Tourist Visas for visitors who arrived in Thailand after March 1st." That is important. We will come back to that. Quoting further: "The proposal was approved by the Vabinet on Tuesday March 31st and is set to be officially announced." So it is important first of all note that it is visitors arriving after March 1st that this will apply to.

We are going to make other videos in a series on this channel and we are going to go into the depths on this with respect to who this is going to apply to, who it will not apply to but if you are a tourist who came in on tourist status or presumably visa-on-arrival tourist status or Thai Visa exemption status, so those who came in and were granted, for example American citizens who come in to Thailand are granted an automatic 30 days stamp under the Visa exemption scheme, those folks it now appears are going to be granted an automatic extension of their current status.  

To the best of my knowledge, there is nothing in here about how long this will last and we will certainly do another video on this channel as soon as we find out more details. We are going to do some other videos shortly after this one which will go into detail about who exactly this applies to. Sort of a hint, in subsequent videos, we will get into the analysis but it looks like this is going to be tourists only. So those who are in Thailand in some sort of non-immigrant status for example this may not apply to you. But good news for folks who are here who are stranded as tourists, it looks like you folks are not going to need to particularly worry about dealing with your immigration status and that seems to have come up as a result of the Prime Minister of Thailand being worried that there are too many people sort of gathering together at the Immigration Office to seek extension of stay so they have gone ahead and it looks like they are going to go ahead and issue this order that these folks be allowed to automatically have their stay extended.

We will keep you updated on this channel as things progress so stay tuned.