BritTim

What is your general relationship like with your soon to be ex wife? With minimal cooperation from her, you can buy yourself another 15 months. When an extension based on marriage ends with divorce, your permission to stay immediately ends. However, a multiple entry Non O visa remains valid until its date of expiry. With a couple of photocopies and signatures, you can go to Savannakhet or Ho Chi Minh City just prior to the divorce and get a multiple entry Non O visa. This is valid for entry to Thailand for a year, and you can get a final 90 days by leaving and returning to Thailand just prior to the visa's expiry date

If you are denied entry into Thailand, your exit stamp from Cambodia will be cancelled, and you never left Cambodia. If denied at Aran, you will have a nasty denied entry stamp in your passport which may create a problem entering through other land crossings from Cambodia. (You will still be OK if you make the inconvenient trek to a land crossing from Laos to Thailand.)

One option from Siem Reap is O'Smach/Chong Chom. The border is not very far, but there was very little public transport the last time I checked, and it takes you to Surin province in Thailand that may not be particularly convenient in many cases. If you are currently in Siem Reap, ask around locally to see if there are buses to O'Smach. Alternatively, if your bargaining skills are good, taxis in Cambodia can be remarkably cheap. Your hotel may (or may not!) be helpful in finding a good taxi at a good price.

Call me a cynic, but I think it is much more likely that the senior officials in Immigration are pressuring Thailand Elite for a (bigger) cut of the Elite membership fee. Those with a problem should wait a few months, and then contact Thailand Elite to see if their dispute with Immigration has been resolved.

According to the Thai Immigration Act, Immigration officials are only supposed to deny you entry with a visa for reasons specified in Section 12 of the Act. Unlike with visa exemption, the intent is that entry with a visa is permitted or denied according to clear cut criteria, with the officials not having discretion. At some airports, the law is strictly followed in that respect. However, in recent years, at some airports, notably both Suvarnabhumi and Don Muang, officials have occasionally taken to denying entry with tourist visas. When they do so, they must pretend, officially, that it is pursuant to one of the reasons specified in Section 12 of the Act. They will only tell you verbally the real (improper) reason why they decided to deny you entry. The denial stamp in your passport will give a bogus reason (often claiming, for instance, that you have no visible source of income for your stay in Thailand). Under Section 22 of the Act, you are supposed to be able to appeal this, but Immigration will prevent you from submitting an appeal.

The Lao eVisa is a bit more expensive than a visa on arrival (especially if you have clean, undamaged US$ notes available to pay for it). Further, there are some entry points where the eVisa cannot be used. It does, however, save space in your passport, and can sometimes save you time on entry to Laos, especially out of regular working hours when the visa on arrival desk might not be open.

If you already have a bank account, there is no need for an agent, assuming it is only in your name, not a joint account. You will just need to transfer 800k baht into the account, and be prepared to offer proof that it came from overseas.

That is pretty odd. Delta is an IATA member airline, and have easy access to the rules. Maybe, go through the checks on the IATA Travel Centre site (https://www.iatatravelcentre.com/TH-Thailand-passport-visa-health-travel-document-requirements.htm) taking screen copies at each step, and show this to the airline supervisor if they are still unaware of the rules Delta has agreed to follow.

Nobody can say for sure, but you would be well advised to arrange entering by land if you want to rely on visa exemptions. When you enter by air, it is up to the discretion of the immigration officials whether to grant you the visa exemption. With your recent immigration history, I would be very nervous. At most land crossings, you are pretty safe relying on visa exempt entry twice per calendar year. Avoid the Poipet/Aranyaprathet border crossing with Cambodia, though.

If you have a visa, there is no reason why the airline should care whether you have an onward/return flight booked. It is only if you are traveling without a visa (or re-entry permit) planning to rely on a visa exemption, that the airline will more often than not want to see on onward flight booking.

Do a border bounce by land, avoiding Poipet/Aranyaprathet. If you risk a visa exempt entry by air again, you will probably be OK, but there is a realistic chance you could be denied entry. Alternatively, get a tourist visa. That will make a denied entry, even by air, very unlikely, but still conceivable at some airports.

Do you really mean "departure" or was that a slip? Surely, you meant "arrival".

Really, it seems as though your best option might just be to allow your current permission to stay to expire, and get a fresh Non O visa for your return.

You also have the option of 1 x 20 mins at the airport if you prefer a multiple (saving space in your passport if you really travel frequently).

Any time you are declared an INAD (inadmissible person) by immigration, for whatever reason, it immediately becomes the responsibility of the airline to remove you from Thailand as soon as is reasonably practicable. This is true whether you pay or not, though the airline will generally find a way to get you pay in practice. Most often, if you are eligible for re-entry there, the airline will transport you back to your last embarkation point. Failing that, they may try to send you to your home country, though it can become tricky if they do not fly there. Sometimes if you thoroughly understand what is going on, you can ask the airline supervisor to take you anywhere they fly where you would like to go (promising to pay without complaint, and hinting you might resist payment if they take you somewhere else). Note that people often term this process "deportation", but that is a misnomer. Deportation occurs only once you are admitted to the country, and the rules are totally different. There is no other consequence, except a nasty stamp in your passport that might be treated as a red flag by immigration in other countries.

You seem to have unusual circumstances but, like others, I am not sure I understand what they are. It seems you want to take a trip (duration unclear, destination unclear, timing unclear) but this somehow gets in the way of the normal process of getting a one-year extension. Anyway, you can get a 60-day extension but, note carefully, only if you have never previously had a 60-day extension since your initial entry into Thailand (with entries with a re-entry permit not qualifying you for an additional 60-day extension). Since you are aware of the 60-day extension, I am concerned that you might already have had one.

Stay away from the Non O-A visa! You are lucky that the application requirements steered you away from it. If you stay long term, the original Non O-A visa ends up requiring you to have (possibly unobtainable, and certainly costly) insurance.

There is no requirement for an onward flight ticket either at check in or on entry into Thailand. However, it might well be needed to apply for the tourist visa. The rules on that vary from embassy to embassy.

Note that, for the "conversion" Non O visa, you must apply at least 15 days before expiry of your permission to stay. If you need more time, you can extend your permission to stay from your visa exempt entry prior to the Non O visa application.

Which immigration office demanded the 8,000 baht bribe? Can you think of any irregularity in your application that might have justified it?

This kind of issue when trying to register has been reported occasionally, and does apparently eventually resolve itself. See, for instance, this post from late July. I suggest you wait for the staff to arrive at work today (Monday) and fix the issue, then try again.

You will need to fly in at least one direction (either when leaving or when returning)

Immigration's system should contain a complete record of all entries and departures from Thailand, back for many years, together with the type of visa used. In addition, it should have details of all extensions, re-entry permits, and any "conversion" visas you have received from Immigration in Thailand. (There will not be full details of visas issued by embassies/consulates abroad, but that should not be needed. Only the type which is noted on your entry record.) Why they asked to see your visa was unclear. Maybe, when data was transferred from your old passport to new passport, the official omitted to note the type of visa on which your original extension was based. They might just have wanted to double check that information in Immigration's computer system was correct.

I would add to the comments on why a re-entry permit exists (rather than just allowing you to automatically reinstate your previous permission to stay when you re-enter) that it may be partly due to a past historical issue. Today, Immigration's computer system contains all the information that is needed to resurrect the previous permission to stay. Decades ago, when the re-entry permit system was first used, no such system existed. Some mechanism was needed to tell Immigration that you were eligible for a re-entry, and the details of the permission to stay to be reinstated. A special stamp in your passport made sense as a way to do so. This stamp would only be placed in your passport on request, so as not to unnecessarily use space when you did not intend coming back (usually true when travel was much less convenient than today).

It would be an unusual treatment regimen that required regular presence at the hospital over a lengthy period, but did not impede travel between the treatments. What do you have in mind? Radiation treatments following cancer surgery that are projected to continue once every two weeks for six months? I do not think there is anything in the rules that prevents an embassy from issuing a multiple entry Non O for medical treatment but, even with a pretty convincing explanation from the hospital, I think it would be very difficult to get.