Suvarnabhumi airport to receive 200,000 air passengers tomorrow

 

 

Suvarnabhumi International Airport is expected to receive 200,000 passengers on Sunday (Feb 18), the record high in its history.

 

Pol Maj Gen Pruthipong Prayoonsiri, commander of Immigration Bureau 2, disclosed after joining activities at Don Mueang and Suvarnabhumi airports to welcome tourists visiting Bangkok during the Chinese New Year festival, that the Airports of Thailand reported that on Sunday, Feb 18, Suvarnabhumi Airport will receive up to 200,000 air travellers in a single day which is its record high.

 

Of the 200,000 passengers, 160,000 passengers will be on international flights.

 

Full story: http://englishnews.thaipbs.or.th/suvarnabhumi-airport-receive-200000-air-passengers-tomorrow/

 

 

-- © Copyright Thai PBS 2018-02-17

avoid suvarnabhum airport tomorrow at all cost. It will be chaos! Thais are unable to plan anything....

The Chinese tend to move in large groups, as I saw at Don Muang last year. So you go from being half empty to suddenly rammed in a split second.  One of my colleagues calls them locusts, which is a bit unfair, but I get his point. 

Yet another reason to only ever fly business class. 

God help anyone unfortunate enough to get caught in the undoubted immigration queue nightmare. I foresee, Ah! Mr. Wong. Congratulations on being our 200,000th delayed customer today. Have a pineapple and an orchid, and try not to get robbed, cheated or run over during your stay.

Edited February 17, 20188 yr by darksidedog
Typo

As with many stats produced, I think here will be full of crap tomorrow.

8K passengers per hour ?

 

15 minutes ago, surangw said:

8K passengers per hour ?

 

It doesn't seem possible, does it?  Let's say they have 50 immigration desks open at any one time (probably optimistic), that's 160 tourists per desk per hour.  If an immigration desk can process a tourist every two minutes on average, there would still need to be 270 open at any one time for 8,000 tourist per hour.  And even that number is an underestimate as they won't come evenly across 24 hours.

Edited February 17, 20188 yr by ChidlomDweller

how many  staff will  call in sick?

3 hours ago, Raymonddiaz said:

avoid suvarnabhum airport tomorrow at all cost. It will be chaos! Thais are unable to plan anything....

Just more knee-jerk Thai bashing with zero basis in fact.

Returned from Frankfurt 2 days ago, A380 without an empty seat.  All 3 immigration areas were well staffed and despite hoards of passengers coming in from both ends, I was stamped through Immigration in 10 minutes which, BTW, is ten minutes less than I had to wait in queue at Frankfurt Immigration a few days before.

On the plus side, the Thai merchants/hustlers/etc will be more focused on grifting the Chinese tourists than us occidentals

 

Once when flying from Canada to the US I went through US Immigration and Customs in Canada, before boarding the plane.  Maybe Thailand should consider something similar for these periods of cattle-car volume.

Man, can you imagine what it must be like on one of those planes?

 

 

As far as immigration procedures concerns, Thailand in that regard still stuck in the 19th

century and acting like one of those derided communist countries where a stern looking

official is looking closely at you and your travel documents and permits and than if all

well put that ink chop in your passport, for a country that take in dozens of millions

of tourists and other travelers a year, surly a better system is well overdue,

having said that, and if a new system will be introduced, what will be become of

the many thousand of the immigrations personals?....

5 hours ago, dddave said:

Just more knee-jerk Thai bashing with zero basis in fact.

Returned from Frankfurt 2 days ago, A380 without an empty seat.  All 3 immigration areas were well staffed and despite hoards of passengers coming in from both ends, I was stamped through Immigration in 10 minutes which, BTW, is ten minutes less than I had to wait in queue at Frankfurt Immigration a few days before.

you were just lucky that day.

Pay attention. 160K foreign travelers - roughly 1/2 coming in and 1/2 departing. Keep in mind also that some of the arrivals will just be passing through going to somewhere other than Thailand.

12 hours ago, Raymonddiaz said:

avoid suvarnabhum airport tomorrow at all cost. It will be chaos! Thais are unable to plan anything....

Schipol has  warned of long waits during summer holiday peaks 

allow three hours to get checked in through passport control and security exactly as the thai authorities have done,they are going to train unarmed police to man passport control!!! you might want to have a go at the Chinese it's them leaving that will mess it up,read a story of a Chinese women climbing into a x-ray machine because she did not want to leave her ? for a second.

Mainland Chinese visitors need to go through the VoA process/channel, which I think feeds into a separate set of arriving Immigration desks? At least that was my observation arriving SBIA/BKK late Friday evening, where it took me ~ 15 minutes to clear immigration. My bag came out after another 10 minutes, maybe not so surprising given there were 600+ pax on my EK flight from HKG.

9 hours ago, dddave said:

Just more knee-jerk Thai bashing with zero basis in fact.

Returned from Frankfurt 2 days ago, A380 without an empty seat.  All 3 immigration areas were well staffed and despite hoards of passengers coming in from both ends, I was stamped through Immigration in 10 minutes which, BTW, is ten minutes less than I had to wait in queue at Frankfurt Immigration a few days before.

Well I came in from Singapore a couple of weeks back and it took me 3-hours and that even blagging my way into the priority queue.

I must have gone through immigration about 50 times and only once was the wait long, maybe 50-60 minutes.  I remember twice when I had to wait a half hour. Usually I'm through in 10 minutes and often in less than 5 minutes.

 

Not to deny those who had to wait hours, but it makes me wonder: at what times did you come?  

 

PS: Schiphol used to be one to dread, but now with the automated passport scanning system it's a breeze, at least for EU citizens.

 

 

Edited February 18, 20188 yr by ChidlomDweller

6 hours ago, ezzra said:

having said that, and if a new system will be introduced, what will be become of

the many thousand of the immigrations personals?....

They can become Thai Niyom goodwill ambassadors throughout the country.

More importantly, when will they expel 200,000?

15 hours ago, Deserted said:

The Chinese tend to move in large groups, as I saw at Don Muang last year. So you go from being half empty to suddenly rammed in a split second.  One of my colleagues calls them locusts, which is a bit unfair, but I get his point. 

 

Isn't that because they're all marshalled around by some people carrying flags uo for them to follow?

I've mentioned this before but it's worth repeating:

A Suvarnabhumi, when you approach the incline leading to the immigration area, look for 3 TV monitors at the base of the incline.  These monitors show all 3 immigration areas.  It is not unusual for one to be backed-up and the adjoining area to be almost empty.  If your initial area is backed-up, just keep walking in the same direction, about 200 meters and you may get through a lot quicker.

 

Basically, Area A aligns with baggage carousels  1-8, Area B: 9-15, Area C, 16-22

And of those 200'000 Chinese arrivals most of them will have not filled out their arrivals card when they arrive at the immigration window. 

 

Hope immigration has a good supply of pens!

 

 

6 hours ago, Raymonddiaz said:

you were just lucky that day.

Actually, I fly in and out of BKK about 30+ times a year to airports all around the world as a courier for a Hong Kong based agency.  I have been through virtually every major and several minor European Airports as well as most major cities in the US and Mexico as well as most major Asian cities.

Airports I dread the most are CDG in France, LHR in the UK, Fiumicino, Italy and LAX/JFK/ATL/ORD in the US.

BKK can have it's bad days like any airport in the world but for the most part, I am in and out of BKK far more quickly than most others.

13 hours ago, surangw said:

8K passengers per hour ?

 

13 hours ago, ChidlomDweller said:

It doesn't seem possible, does it?  Let's say they have 50 immigration desks open at any one time (probably optimistic), that's 160 tourists per desk per hour.  If an immigration desk can process a tourist every two minutes on average, there would still need to be 270 open at any one time for 8,000 tourist per hour.  And even that number is an underestimate as they won't come evenly across 24 hours.

The number of arrivals is not determined, nor restricted by, the number of IOs.

7 hours ago, Raymonddiaz said:

you were just lucky that day.

I must have been "just lucky" then, also, on both occasions that I returned from Hong Kong recently. 

 

The first one I was through in about 10 minutes, the second time I was able to go directly to an IO with no queue at all and I wasn't one of the first off the plane (neither am I a sprinter).

3 hours ago, rtco said:

Well I came in from Singapore a couple of weeks back and it took me 3-hours and that even blagging my way into the priority queue.

Sure.

Slowest immigration lines i have been in are "any US airport" much slower than any Thai immigration que I have been through.

2 hours ago, Baerboxer said:

17 hours ago, Deserted said:

The Chinese tend to move in large groups, as I saw at Don Muang last year. So you go from being half empty to suddenly rammed in a split second.  One of my colleagues calls them locusts, which is a bit unfair, but I get his point. 

Isn't that because they're all marshalled around by some people carrying flags uo for them to follow?

 

Actually, it's because they come on airplanes and when those planes land (sometimes 2-5 of them at once), there's suddenly a bunch of them in the queue.  It just happens that a lot of those planes are now coming from China.  Which, like it or not, is saving the Thai tourism industry right now- admittedly to the inconvenience of all the wannabe bwana's.   

 

I'm often the only white guy on the plane I take from a 2nd tier city in China to BKK.  Which exposes me to the worst of it, and it's really not that bad unless there's a bunch landing at once.

 

Edit:  Give me a horde of noisy Chinese any day over a bunch like the family of Aussies on that cruise liner in the news today.  I should say say "no longer" onboard because they got hauled off to port- around 24-30 of them.

 

Edited February 18, 20188 yr by impulse

When, after a two hour wait to clear Immigration, many will be going into Bangkok.  It took me three hours to get from BKK to downtown because of the horrendous traffic jams shortly after leaving the airport which continued right into the city centre.  You are charged three times to use toll roads which should give you trouble-free motoring but crawls (if you're lucky.)  Then you hit the smog!

It will be a long time before I go again; they say it will take 11 years for the air quality to become safe by which time I will be 86!