Phuket Immigration now issues retirement visas

PHUKET: -- If you’re over fifty and looking to spend your retirement in Phuket, you no longer have to leave behind the comforts of Phuket to acquire a retirement visa. Phuket Immigration Office, at Sapan Hin, is now authorised to issue the long-stay visas – and it can all be sorted out in the comfort of their office – which also now offers free tea and coffee to make the wait all that more pleasant.

"Foreigners must have at least 800,000 baht deposited in a Thai bank and a medical certificate to guarantee that they are healthy. If they are qualified and come with all required documents, the process is not going to take long at all,” Superintendent of Phuket Immigration, Pol Col Prayut Chommalee told Phuket Post, going on to explain that since the service was launched March not few foreigners have taken advantage of the new service, “because not many of them know about it yet.”

The process, according to Immigration’s Pol Capt Krisarat Nuesen, requires the retirees th to apply for a 90-day non-immigrant ‘O’ visa, which immigration can then extend to a year, for retirees and after that apply to extend their stay for a year stay visa. Capt Krisarat added that the 800,000 baht bank deposit requirement can be waived, if the retiree can produce a letter from their embassy certifying that they are receiving a pension of at least at least 65,000 baht a month.

“It was amazing,” one British retiree told the Post when he stumbled across the new visa service by accident. “I went from a 30-day tourist visa, to a non-immigrant ‘O’, to a retirement visa in just over an hour after arriving there. While I was waiting, one of the assistants came over and asked me if I was comfortable and if I wanted a cup of tea. Now that’s service.”

--Phuket Post 2006-04-11

Interesting but confusing as they mention a 30 day "tourist visa" and there is no such thing for a Brit. If they can now issue a non immigrant from a 30 day stay it is news but otherwise it appears to be the same conversion of a real tourist visa at 2,000 baht Bangkok has been dong for the last year or two.

Interesting but confusing ...

You are right. Another pseudo-journalist who does not know what he is writing about. There are far too many of them.

---------------

Maestro