khunjeff

Another day, another self-promoting AoT press release - but they never seem to include any maps or drawings that would help us understand exactly what they claim to be planning. And although they say that "a new southern terminal...is poised for government approval", every news story for the last several years has indicated that the various parties involved haven't even been able to come to an agreement on where the terminal will be located, as some want to stick to the original master plan for the airport and others don't.

And beds measured in feet, layer cakes from the bakery in pounds, televisions in inches...

Thai immigration forms are all about, well...form, rather than substance. They're confusing and poorly formatted, but the officers also don't seem to care what's written in most of the spaces as long as they've been filled in using the right color of ink. A start would be to make them into actual forms, rather than the current weird format in which they're laid out like letters from the applicant to the head of immigration. A logical next step would be to combine most of them into a single form on which you could just check a box to show why you were filling it out, since many/most of the forms ask for exactly the same information. But I won't hold my breath waiting for any of those things to happen.

The rule has been pretty clear for about four years now: no need to do a TM-30 when returning home after domestic travel, and no need to do one when returning from overseas if you're going back to your habitual residence and you're still on the same multiple-entry visa or reentry permit (which would be the case for any LTR holder). The problem, of course, is that individual offices (or even officers) often ignore the policies handed down by HQ, so you're forced to follow whatever nonsense they've invented.

More visitors to Kanchanaburi than to Phuket? That's just extremely hard to believe, given that Kanchanaburi probably has 1/10 the number of hotel rooms, and is visited mainly on weekends - but these are government statistics, so they must be true 😄

The wording on the document is confusing, but what you have is an E-Visa, not an "approval letter". You had 60 days from the BOI's "endorsement of qualifications" to get your visa issued, and you did that, so at this point you can enter Thailand at your leisure - just bring a printout of the E-Visa. Congratulations on getting the LTR!

There is no requirement for an annual check-in. Just as with the 90 day reporting, there is a requirement to report if you have resided continuously in Thailand for more than one year. Anytime you leave the country, that one year clock starts again upon your return. You have not been in Thailand continuously for one year, so there's no need for you to report at all. They clearly don't understand the rules for the LTR (which has existed for over a year and a half at this point, so the "it's new" excuse is wearing thin). The form is different, and the reporting timeframe is different. They gave you instructions as though you were supposed to do 90 day reporting, which you aren't.

For anyone who wants to get way down into the weeds on this issue, the video below has pretty good explanations of how rails respond to temperature changes, and what engineers can do to prevent warping and buckling.

So they were found at exactly the place they were headed for - that must have been a massive search!

Amazing how the soft opening of a concourse (NOT terminal) that very few passengers have used has caused the ranking to jump ten points. Amazing how adding two dozen extra gates somehow increased passenger capacity by 33%, without any increase in immigration, security, check-in, or baggage handling capacity. Amazing how apparently AOT now has authority over police personnel matters.

Thank you for the correction - that's very useful information.

We don't have enough tourists. We have too many tourists. We don't have enough tourists. We have too many tourists. ...and on and on, ad infinitum and ad nauseam

In my experience, it will give that "we're too busy" message if the wifi signal is weak, so switching to cellular data usually takes care of the issue. Using wifi per se isn't a problem, as long as you've enabled that options in the app. The message also seems to come up if I'm in a crowded place - like a night market or expo - where lots of people are trying to pay at the same time. There is a 10 baht fee, but it's being waived until the end of May. https://mgronline.com/onlinesection/detail/9670000030538

Visa and Mastercard don't distinguish between local and international cards - the interchange fee is the same, unless they've negotiated special deals with every Thai bank. Let's see how many "cash is king" replies this post gets, because that's an incredibly original take here on AN.

Each time they announce one of these new cross-border agreements, I read the details and it turns out that only a few Thai banks are participating, and that my bank (Kasikorn) isn't one of them. I hope this changes in the future.

If you read more detailed articles about this incident, there were several broken business class seats on this aircraft. The flight attendant told the passenger that they had been reported as malfunctioning months earlier and he (the FA) couldn't understand why they were still being sold.

I was wondering where this expressway was, so I looked it up and discovered that construction hasn't even started yet - that might have been a useful bit of information to include in the article.

Anyone who wants power this desperately shouldn't have it.

I was in Chiang Rai a couple of months ago for the first time in many years, and the airport is in absolutely appalling condition. If they actually care about "passenger satisfaction", they could start by just doing basic repairs and maintenance in the check-in and gate areas - no need to join any "programme".

Aside from the fact that these materials are sold openly everywhere, I wonder why this is treated as a police and "consumer protection" matter. If the main gripe with vapes is taxation (which I think it mostly is), have the revenue and customs departments crack down. If it's public health, have the health ministry confiscate the stuff. But clearly these periodic raids of a tiny number of vendors are just for show.

Glad to see they're focusing on only the most important crimes 🙄

Or to put it another way - no, it isn't, at all.

It took a special inspection to notice that 69 escalators and elevators were out of order?!?

The much-discussed tourist tax is not mentioned anywhere in the article - this appears to be a separate scheme. They're not. Even if you believed all the stories about non-paying tourists (mostly generated by one particular director of one particular hospital on one particular island), the unpaid cost would have averaged out to less than 10 baht per foreign arrival. The "solution" dreamed up to this problem was the 300 baht tourist tax mentioned above - I think we can all do the math on that. Yes, they could easily have done that. But they wanted only foreigners to pay, and the airlines told them there was no way to collect a charge that only applied to certain passengers. So, the whole plan has been (temporarily?) shelved.

So he didn't "fall", he intentionally climbed over the safety rail and jumped.