Immigration Meeting Confirms Need For Foreigners To Register Place Of Residence

[mcd]

On Friday afternoon a large group of hotel, guest house and condo owners and managers attended a meeting conducted by Colonel Itipon, the chief of Pattaya’s Immigration police.

The colonel told attendees the Immigration Department intends to enforce the regulations regarding the registration of all foreigners who stay in the Pattaya-Jomtien area, whether they are here as tourists for a few days or weeks or are living in houses or condos.

Colonel Itipon said all hotels, guest houses and landlords must notify Immigration within 24 hours of the arrival of a new resident or guest and people with 90-day visas must report to Immigration and give their place of residence as each three-monthly date falls due.

Those interested in finding out more about the activities and intentions of the Immigration service here, you can log on to their website: www.pattaya-immigration.org.

Pattaya City News http://www.pattayacitynews.net/news_15_06_50.htm

[Mobi]

Does this mean that if you have friends or relatives who come to stay with you in your house , or condo, as guests, that you as the landlord, are required to notify immigration?

Also if a tourist was to stay at the house of of his girlfriend or friend, would the Thai house owner be required to notify immigration?

It certainly sounds like it to me.

Does anyone have any knowledge or ideas on this?

[sumrit]

people with 90-day visas must report to Immigration and give their place of residence as each three-monthly date falls due.

[/url]

Surely when we do our 90 day border runs and give immigration our address in Thailand on the arrival card we are doing just that.

[Kerryd]

I tried looking through their website, but couldn't find much information (in English at least). They do have lots of forms/applications on there though.

It does sound like (from the article in the OP) that they expect every alien that passes through to be registered with them. Sheesh, the amount of paperwork they would end up with, for people that stay for just a couple of days (not to mention the people that stay for longer and switch hotels and so on). They'd need a bigger office and larger staff just to deal wth that.

By the time they waded through the paperwork, most of those "short-timers" would have been long gone anyways.

Then again, it could be just a slight mis-interpretation, or misunderstanding, of what Colonel Itipon really said (or meant to say).

[Tywais]

Colonel Itipon said all hotels, guest houses and landlords must notify Immigration within 24 hours of the arrival of a new resident or guest and people with 90-day visas must report to Immigration and give their place of residence as each three-monthly date falls due.

I thought hotels, etc. sent the report to the local police department and not immigration. How do they handle weekends and holidays when immigration is closed. Not possible to do it within 24 hours on these occasions.

[Phil Conners]

Maybe they send it by fax/email?

[redwood13]

Friend of mine went to Pattaya Immigration on Thursday to register his tenants. From his experience it's just once again a case of the drafting of rules that are passed down the chain of command with no guidelines as to how the policy is to be implemented. (See the 90 day stay in 6 months fiasco for example.)

There was one woman at the 90 day report desk assigned to take care of this. She had no idea what she was supposed to do and her superiors simply avoided her - thus no loss of face - as they had no clue either.

-redwood

[monty]

Indeed legally everybody is required to report any foreigner staying on their property, even if only for 1 night!

Condo owners, house owners, guest houses, hotels etc. are all required to do this reporting.

Practically, they would be swamped if everybody would comply, yet every so often they raid some guesthouse (most often some cheap Soi bua Khao place, on the look for broke overstaying farangs), who then get fined for not having reported their guests...

The form needed for this reporting can be found here:

http://www.pattaya-immigration.org./other%...edures/tm30.pdf

Must be a bloody funny job in for example Ambassador City, with their odd 5000 rooms and often several hundreds of Russians/Chinese tourists checking in at once, to fill out the guest list with these incomprehensible names, along with passport number, TM card number, place of entry etc etc...

Even if they can do it on-line, they wouldn't have finished typing in one batch before the next comes in

Immigration in Thailand definitely eats away quite a few trees a year!

[observer21]

Indeed legally everybody is required to report any foreigner staying on their property, even if only for 1 night!

Condo owners, house owners, guest houses, hotels etc. are all required to do this reporting.

Practically, they would be swamped if everybody would comply, yet every so often they raid some guesthouse (most often some cheap Soi bua Khao place, on the look for broke overstaying farangs), who then get fined for not having reported their guests...

The form needed for this reporting can be found here:

http://www.pattaya-immigration.org./other%...edures/tm30.pdf

Must be a bloody funny job in for example Ambassador City, with their odd 5000 rooms and often several hundreds of Russians/Chinese tourists checking in at once, to fill out the guest list with these incomprehensible names, along with passport number, TM card number, place of entry etc etc...

Even if they can do it on-line, they wouldn't have finished typing in one batch before the next comes in

Immigration in Thailand definitely eats away quite a few trees a year!

So one wonders how they process all this information.  Total information overload makes the system unworkable, but nobody will object - face face face

[Mobi]

Indeed legally everybody is required to report any foreigner staying on their property, even if only for 1 night!

Condo owners, house owners, guest houses, hotels etc. are all required to do this reporting.

Practically, they would be swamped if everybody would comply, yet every so often they raid some guesthouse (most often some cheap Soi bua Khao place, on the look for broke overstaying farangs), who then get fined for not having reported their guests...

The form needed for this reporting can be found here:

http://www.pattaya-immigration.org./other%...edures/tm30.pdf

Must be a bloody funny job in for example Ambassador City, with their odd 5000 rooms and often several hundreds of Russians/Chinese tourists checking in at once, to fill out the guest list with these incomprehensible names, along with passport number, TM card number, place of entry etc etc...

Even if they can do it on-line, they wouldn't have finished typing in one batch before the next comes in

Immigration in Thailand definitely eats away quite a few trees a year!

So if you take this to its logical conclusion, any farang who lives in his own house/condo, or in a leased house/condo, or even in his wif'es house, would have to declare his addresss every 90 days as the resident alien, and then either he (or his wife, GF etc) would also have to report to immigration as the owner/leasor of the residence where he is staying.

You could end up reporting yourself twice.

Or have I missed something?

[Phil Conners]

Apparently immigration Jomtien are open 7 days/week for things like this, just not visa stuff.

[tropo]

Apparently immigration Jomtien are open 7 days/week for things like this, just not visa stuff.

Are they open on Saturday to process visa extensions?

[Mobi]

Apparently immigration Jomtien are open 7 days/week for things like this, just not visa stuff.

A few months back they announced that they would no longer open on Saturdays due to 'lack of business", and to my knowledge they never opened on Sundays.

Or is there a special section that is open every day?

[Phil Conners]

I asked them yesterday and they said they are open every day for this type of activity (receiving reports).

No visa services available sat-sun.