khunjeff

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.

AOT is a for-profit public company, and posted a net profit of 8.8 billion baht in fiscal year 2023.

Yes the roughly 1.75 Euro increase in ticket prices will make a huge difference after not being adjusted for years. Grow up. Adding in small but irritating fees is, in fact, exactly what "nickel and diming" is. And this particular increase has nothing whatsoever to do with "adjusting" the passenger service charge for inflation. As the article explains, it's to pay for check-in equipment that in almost every other country would be installed and paid for by airlines as a means of saving on labor costs, not put in by airport management at the expense of passengers. So yes, we will now pay AOT for the privilege of doing the check-in ourselves instead of having professionals do it for us as part of our fare.

Your timeline is backwards. The Royal Decree instituting the tax exemption for LTR holders was introduced in May 2022, before the current PM was even in power. The Revenue Department order regarding overseas income was issued in September 2023.

If you're talking about US passports, there is no additional fee getting the larger passport book - and it's now given automatically if you apply abroad.

I think this will mostly be of use to people who don't normally use Grab and may not understand how to use the service. For regular users, you're correct that the current system works perfectly fine.

Remember this one from over a year ago? And whatever happened with it? Oh, right - nothing. https://aseannow.com/topic/1285260-chuwit-bombshell-claims-massive-organised-met-police-racket-nets-central-fund-324-mb-month-sky-arrives-in-bangkok/

Again, they are not saying that Fast Track doesn't exist, and are not saying that authorized passengers are being charged for the service. Fast Track obviously is real, and anyone in one of the permitted categories can use it for free. What they are claiming - absurdly - is that Fast Track service isn't being corruptly sold to unauthorized pax, even though exactly that type of sale is widely advertised and has been used by commenters on this thread.

Is this the same AOT that opened Suvarnabhumi with a system that would have required arriving passengers to take a bus to a remote transportation center in order to get a taxi, because they wanted to try to force people to use AOT's own "limousine" service? And that then had to hurriedly backtrack after the public outcry and set up taxi dispatchers at card tables on the pavement outside of the arrivals area? And the same AOT that installed giant rotating turnstiles at the departures level to prevent people from walking out to get into incoming taxis? Yeah, I thought so.

Here's what's advertised by the airport operator itself:

Thai Elite maybe No, there are other cart services that are not connected with Thai Privilege, and they are advertised all over with packages that include Fast Track immigration. Even AOT itself sells this kind of service through its "Sawasdee Pass" scheme. LTR, SMART Visa, Thai Elite, and a few others are specifically authorized to use Fast Track. The article isn't saying that Fast Track doesn't exist, just making the ludicrous claim that the privilege isn't being openly sold to pax who don't qualify to use it.

Those numbers seem way, way too low. That would mean fewer than two scam calls per phone number per year, and pretty much everyone I know or have read about receives far more than that number per week.