Flink

Well, to be fair, they could set up their testing stations in the arrivals area, do ATK tests and have your results in your hand by the time your bags arrive on the carousel. Thus removing the requirement for an SHA+ booking. But they can't do that because the owners of those hotels have parted with a lot of brown envelopes to get their SHA+ status and so far have not seen the millions of baht the government told them they'd get off of the hundreds of thousands (??) of tourists they'd be accommodating. The government is stuck between a rock and a hard place. They wan to make it easier for tourists to come here (obviously without opening bars etc.) but at the same time there are so many hi-so's with shares in the SHA+ hotels that need to be kept happy too. Tourists will be here a few weeks or months, those hi-so's will be having a go at them for years so they choose the path of least resistance.

Well that's not permitted! It's bigoted and xenophobic to name avariant after the place it originated. Kind of wierd that the very people who kicked up stink and had the terms China flu, Kent variant and India variant still haven't done anything about Spanish flu or the term lesbian which is unkind to people from Lesbos. So we now have the Alpha variant (Kent variant), Beta variant (South Africa variant), Gamma variant (Brazil variant), Delt variant (India variant). I am utterly shocked that the "anti-racists" haven't kicked of about the variant from the predominantly white country being classed as Alpha ahead of the variants from countries with a high percentage of POC. ???? ????

Why can't the government ministers do just that? Keep their <deleted> mouths shut until they have finalised a decision and it's being typeset a the gazette offices? But of course they won't because: A. They are all too busy trying to improve their media profile and getting as many column inches and spotlight time. B. They still haven't realised that by doing all this time and time again they are making themselves look bigger and bigger fools, not only to the Thai population (who they don't give a flying <deleted> about) but also to the rest of the world and therefore are losing what few tourists may have been considering coming here. For a country so set on attracting rich and "quality" tourists here they really do go out of their way to make the country less appealing as each day goes by.

Would that that were true in the school's eyes. All I get from them is that I need to make my online lessons more fun, or that I should contact the students and arrange to teach them some other time. Bear in mind that when we were teaching in school pre covid I had M5 classes where I didn't see 3/4 of the students for the whole semester!

God I hope mine don't do that. Trying to "teach" a class of 130+ online is a nightmare! Give me 20 to a class in person any day. At least I'll be able to seewho's actuallythere and not just logged in and gone off to watch TV.

Yes, $10 difference if you're young and fit, over 60 and with underlying health conditions it can be a lot more so the drop to 50k helps there, so long as your policy cover includes all costs relating to an asymptomatic positive test, or, a negative test but classified as a contact trace by the government.

And don't forget that, this being Thailand, having fulfilled all the criteria required to gain entry you could get to the airport to be stood in front of a semi literate IO who lost 5000 baht in a gambling den the previous night and is nursing a hangover who tells you your vaccine certificate isn't valid or some other nonsense and unless you pay 5000 you can't come in.

Oh, and the last one.... Covid test within 24 hours of arrival. Hmm, guess you'll all be needing to book your SHA+/ASQ hotel for 2 or 3 days of your 2 week holiday then because they'll be having "issues" with testing and be taking the FULL 24 hours to get round to carrying out your test and be needing a further 24 hours at least to get the results to you.

Okay, as usual, clear as mud. Couple of red flags however (this may just be down to the way they have worded it - "lost in translation" etc.): Come from countries specified by the Thai Public Health Ministry as being low risk and arrive by air. Odd that, since most countries have the UK and USA as high risk. The excuse for having them on the list is their high levels of vaccination rollout. (Not that they make up a large percentage of the toursts who traditionally come here of course.) Have certificates to confirm that they have received two doses of a recognised COVID-19 vaccine. Have negative COVID-19 results from RT-PCR tests conducted within 72 hours prior to arrival in Thailand. Why the change? It has alays been 72 hours prior to departure. Does that mean that if your flight is delayed in any way you'll be refused entry on arrival because you're outside the 72 hour window? Have a minimum of US$50,000 health insurance coverage. I suppose that must mean the cost of treatment for Covid has gone down 50%?? Also, that is just Health Insurance, not Covid specific health insurance, so either they have decided you won't catch Covid while you're here so don'tneed the US$100,000 Covid insurance they've been demanding for months or someone has messed up the figures. And, as usual, this has all been released prior to being gazetted so prepare for it to all change again before Nov. 1st.

Well, either they don't, in which cse they are bigger morons than we thought, or they do but the "Thai perfect" ideology is so deeply ingrained nthey just don't care.

Ssshhhhh!! That's next months announcement. Don't let the cat out of the bag too soon!

They will,have no doubt about that. There's the government saying they need toimpprove English language training in Thai schools (yeah, it's the teaching that's the problem, not the ridiculous education system!) whilst t the same time requiring higher and higher qualifications and more and more expense (notarizing, apostille etc.) and reducing the wages. Once this new health insurance plan trickles down to all non immigrant visas it will stop anyone considering a job teaching here. I recently looked at teaching jobs in Thailand compared to other Asian countries. I only looked at jobs offered by companies that have offices across Asia and in all cases the lowest wages and least additional bonuses were here in Thailand.

Which is fine until some dipstick in his modded truck playing PUBG on his phone ploughs into you leaving you unconscious and the first ambulance on the scene takes you to a hospital NOT on your insurance policy's list of approved hospitals.

Give it a couple of days and that will be available at the "swab hubs". Just make sure your brown envelope is fat enough to be worth it but not so fat that anyone sees you passing it to the med tech.

It's akin to the mayor of Aspen, Colorado saying Aspen is open to vaccinated tourists but all the ski slopes have been shut down so they can attract more polar bears!

Especially when considering visiting a country with such a low number of vaccinated amongst the population and a requirement for a test prior to departure. Not everyone has a boss who is happy to let you stay on holiday for an extra 2 weeks because you tested positive after travelling in a taxi with an unvaccinated and infected driver.

Except many of those lives won't be saved because the one's who worked in bars and Go Go joints still won't be able to return to work (you REALLY think they're going to let bars open up again in a hurry after the comments they've made recently about aiming for "quality" tourists?). I suppose, for Thais at least, giving 10 days notice is not last minute. That still leaves just about enough time to get your "Thailand Pass" (a COEwithout the quack - if it looks like a duck etc.) PCR test and result, book an ASQ for ?1, 2, 7 nights, depending how fast the "Swab Hubs" decide to work, and pay a bumped up price (even before the new 500 baht additional tax is added - speaking of which, will they be having photo shoots showing the TAT handing out the money to go go dancers and "happy ending" massuese since the fee is supposedly designed to help those hardest hit y the lockdowns in the tourism industry?) Every time I see the government, or TAT or even the banks stating how many millions of tourists are going to come here I can't help but feel they all bought their calculators at the same back street market stall and there's a delay when you hit the "." button before it prints!

Well, the latest from the guy running TAT is that he doesn't want to bring back the bars and clubs and associted "entertainments". Thats logic akin to Biden shutting down border wall construction or Elon Musk deciding that V8's are the future of car manufacturing. You don't discard the very thing (and possibly the only thing) that brought millions of people here every year. This ridiculous idea that Thailand could become the Monaco of Asia as a magnet for the super rich is ridiculous. They don't have the infrastructure in place to do the simple things like keeping the place clean. If the rich and famous docome here it won't be for the "mom and pop" stores and restaurants who are the very peple who need tourist $ the most. The only people who would benefit would be the resort developers and owners and all the money they made would be swiftly sent offshore rather than trickling down to the common folk. Common sense would dictate that you go back to what worked and one the money starts coming back in use it to make improvements to the place with a view to switching up SOME AREAS to attract the big spender, but leave the bulk of the country as it was (pre Covid) so everyone gets a share of the money. The hi-si=o's can have their marinas and wealthy clientele and the rest of the population can skim moneyfrom the backpackers and other tourists.

I don't think the arrival PCR test will be the issue, it will be the departure one. You arrive, vaccinated and confirmed Covid free then head into Bangkok or to the beach somewhere and come into contact wiith unvaccinated and untested locals then on your way out of the kingdom get your departure PCR and test positive and its off to hospital or ASQ with you for 2 weeks. If you're asymptomatic you then have a fight on your hands to get your insurance company to pay for the hospital/ASQ as well as an awkward phonecall to your boss back home to let them know you won't be back in work for a couple more weeks.

I am not sure they are crapping all over the IDEA per se, more about the way in which any such plan would be utilised as yet another stick to beat farangs with. We'd all like to live in a safer society but focusing all their efforts on finding/detaining/blocking foreigners is highly unlikely to improve things much. I'd like to see the RTP and IO do their little photo shoot with a farang who has overstayed or committed an offence if they would then parade out all the Thai criminals they have arrested that week for criminal activity to give us a better perspective of who the major criminals are. (having said that, the RTP kind of do that alrady by all standing there for the photo op!)

No, but apparently they have plenty of plastic bin bags!

Well thatis fairly obvious simply by looking at how many times you visit the same immigration office and have to produce copies of exactly the same paperwork and get your photo taken every time. I don't think the lack of communication is limited to ministries, much of the time I don't think they even communicate within the same office. Either that or immigration offices are only issued with a 256MB flash drive for storing peoples data on so they have to wipe it at the end of each shift, hence the requirement to keep bringing the same paperwork. Hmmmm, judging by the on/off nature of the online reporting systems here I don't think the second reason is too far off the mark....