My Cambodian friend has a Cambodian passport good for three years. It has about 14 months remaining on it before expiry.

For the first roughly two years of the passport, he has been coming to Thailand on tourist visas received in Penom Penh.

I believe he uses a service in PP to handle getting the visa and expedite/grease the wheels as it were.

The passport has roughly about ten Thai tourist visas in it covering the past roughly two years.

He's never had a problem until recently:

In early September, when he came to enter Thailand (land border, Aranyaprathet), they asked to see 20,000 baht. This had never happened before to him. But he showed the money and entered Thailand successfully.

In mid-October, he flew back to PP on a family errand. About October 23, he went to his usual service to get another tourist visa. The Thai embassy in PP asked more questions than usual about where he would stay in Thailand, what he would do in Thailand, and what his work in Cambodia was. In the end, they said that he had a lot tourist visas and he would have to "wait in queue" to get another tourist visa. But no length of wait time was specified. Because of some language difficulty, It's not clear to me if the passport is waiting in the Thai embassy or if the visa service is holding the passport waiting for the "right time" to request the visa, or what.

Anyone have knowledge about this kind of "wait queue" happening? And how long is the "wait queue"? The passport has apparently been "waiting" for about 2 1/2 weeks already.

I suggest asking directly if there is an 'express service' option...