Transcript of the above video: 

We are sort of waiting with bated breath here at the beginning of January 2025 to see what the numbers were for 2024 with regard to tourism into Thailand. I'm very curious for these numbers for a number of reasons. The big one is I would just like to be enthusiastic about a high season for once. It has been a long time since Thailand has had solid tourism numbers and look, we are back, things are sort of turning around here. So the point of this video is conceptually to understand whatever the numbers come back as though, actually I think overall real numbers of people actually here are up, overall. And why do I say that? 

Well in the past, when we had 30-day entry stamps here in Thailand, the 30-day Visa Exemption, somebody that came to Thailand and wanted to be here for like 3 months, they would have to do at least one Border Run, possibly two under that scenario. Well what that led to was a situation where you had people stamping out, stamping back in, and the same person would oftentimes be counted more than once as a tourist, even though effectively they were just here for a prolonged period of time. Now that our Visa Exemption is not 30 days, but now 60 days for most nationalities, and in the case of the Russians and the Kazakhstan passport holders, those folks I believe now get 90 days on arrival. Then on top of that, the creation of the Destination Thailand Visa which at least in at the outset provides for 6 months of lawful status, again those folks were not going back and forth through Border Runs and things, and stamping in and out in order to maintain six months of the status in Thailand. They came in once and they have been here presumably for those 6 months; we are going to see how exactly that plays out in the long term with regard to the documentation on these types of visas. That again we are probably going to see it starting pretty soon here, in the next month or so, how exactly that plays out on the back end. But that said, for the first six months they had lawful status here, they didn't need a new Border Run. 

The point I am trying to make is there have been a lot of questions - I asked them myself in the past - as to what the real tourism numbers were in light of the fact that oftentimes you would probably have people being counted more than once as a tourist here in Thailand. This time around we have got less people having to do Border Runs all the time, and people seem to be wanting to come to Thailand for holidays and all kinds of other reasons. I think regardless of what the ultimate numbers are with respect to tourism, you have to keep in mind we no longer have these people having to bounce in and out and who are being counted as more than one tourist. So the books now are not "cooked" if you will, with regard to how many tourists we actually have here in the Kingdom of Thailand.