khunjeff

Ditto (though I've had mine for "only" 17 months). No visits to immigration, no forms to fill (I leave the country regularly), no bank statements, no photocopies. Visa matters are no longer the constant irritant in my life that they used to be - and I just now sped through Fast Track at the airport in under five minutes. I'm an LTR fan.

There were occasions when I had close to 150 claims in a single year (daily physical therapy to recover use of an injured hand). So yes, it does happen - and even more so when you're including small children, as he did.

Does a pubic u-turn have something to do with gender reassignment surgery? 🤔

They didn't recline properly or turn into lie-flat beds as they were supposed to.

That may be true, but it doesn't explain why TG was still assigning the broken seats to passengers. During the incident that started this whole discussion, the flight attendants told the passenger that the seats had been identified as defective months earlier, but continued to be sold. Thailand was downgraded by the FAA, not TG. The FAA doesn't assess individual foreign airlines. "FAA conducts the International Aviation Safety Assessment Program (IASA), assessing the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) of each country that has carriers operating to the United States. Because of the provisions of the Chicago Convention and national sovereignty, FAA is not permitted to evaluate a foreign carrier within its own sovereign state." https://www.faa.gov/travelers/international_travel#:~:text=If the CAA meets standards,are released to the public. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-34981372

I'm sure those four heroes of law enforcement are feeling justifiable pride in having snared this most dangerous of hardened criminals.

He was arrested for working illegally as a masseur - the "online" part is irrelevant.

That Vietnam e-visa is a tourist visa that cannot be extended - it is in no way comparable to a retirement visa or LTR, neither of which has a Vietnamese equivalent.

Maybe, maybe not. I am also a US government retiree, and while my insurer did provide a letter explaining my unlimited benefits, the accompanying email stated "Note: This letter is a standard letter used by our AFSPA members for overseas travel and Covid coverage and cannot be customized." (BoI didn't accept my insurance - no explanation given - so I ended up getting approved based on bank deposits. Several months later they changed their view, though, and began accepting the exact same insurance with the exact same letter.)

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.