Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the notion of a comparatively smoother Immigration service here in Thailand. What are we talking about? 

Well I thought of making this video after reading a recent article, a rather good article by the way down in the Pattaya Mail, pattayamail.com, and I would urge those are watching this video to go check it out because the thrust of it goes an entirely different direction than just Immigration. I'm going to quote a small excerpt in here but it was quite an interesting article. I thought it was kind of a nice little human interest piece and it was well written but there was a quote in there that I'm going to get to. The article, again Pattaya Mail, pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Pattaya Retirees: Lucas Vanlaar, and again the thrust of that article goes in an entirely different direction but then there was this excerpt, which quoting directly: "So why are Jomtien and Pattaya the final residential result? Quote: "Great choice of restaurants, friendly people, lots of young women and in my view, a much smoother Immigration service than in Bangkok." So there are those that have gotten into this argument over the years, which Immigration is easier to deal with. Is it Bangkok, is it other places, Pattaya, Chiangmai, out in the provinces etc.? My answer to that is it depends on what you're doing, and it depends highly on where you're living. Where you actually live will dictate a lot on which immigration service you use. Now we do a lot of stuff where we will - especially with newcomers - get them sorted out here at Immigration Division 1 and then they may move somewhere other than Bangkok, but they are initially situated in Bangkok and we will get them sorted through the Bangkok Immigration Division and then sort of send them on their way. If they want to go someplace else in the country off they go, and then they deal with things like their extensions and things down the road. They may deal with that in those local jurisdictions. Again their circumstances may warrant dealing with Bangkok again in the future, it kind of depends. 

When comparing Immigration between Pattaya and Bangkok, is there a wildly big difference? Well there is in certain ways. I'd say one of the biggest differences is look at the end of the day even though Immigration down in the Chonburi area does deal with a lot of foreigners, because there's a high foreign presence especially in Pattaya, at the end of the day Immigration in Bangkok is dealing with a much heavier case load. That in and of itself may lend itself to the notion of more efficiency in that jurisdiction. 

That said, I have seen a number of cases over the years where dealing with Bangkok was a much smoother process than dealing with Pattaya Immigration. We've especially seen this in the context of Business Visas. Just generally speaking we have found that dealing with Business Visa matters in Pattaya is oftentimes a much more time consuming resource consuming process compared to dealing with such matters here in Bangkok. Meanwhile things like Retirement Visas seems like it's kind of a mixed bag. For ‘do it yourselfers’, I've heard often times yeah Pattaya is a little bit easier to deal in terms of folks that want to do DIY, do it yourself Immigration, there's nothing wrong with that. Folks that like to do that may find themselves having a less difficult time dealing with Pattaya. That said, I think that the differences there are slightly negligible; I'm not certain that it is a massive difference. I will say that we've seen massive differences with regard to Business Immigration.

One final thing though and this is where I do think it is fair to say Pattaya is probably a little bit more efficient compared to Bangkok is Tourist Vis Extensions. That is something that Pattaya is very used to dealing with and I have to say is very much more keen to streamline processing associated with Tourist Visa applications. I would say retirees may be a mixed bag; it's kind of circumstantially dependent. Business Visas Bangkok is definitely better but with regard to Tourist Visa Extension, Pattaya I think yeah there is no doubt about that, they are almost kind of designed for it. We did a video some time ago, probably 18 months ago, when there was a new Immigration Chief installed in Pattaya and she made it clear that they were going to go out of their way to be more conducive in accommodating especially to Tourist Visa Extensions. So again, depending on what you are going to do, there may be comparative efficiencies in the Immigration Offices, here in the Kingdom of Thailand.