Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing whether or not anybody is going to actually want to come to a "dry" Thailand. To preface this video, I never really wanted to become an advocate for alcohol in Thailand. That is not really my purpose; it is not really my goal in life but I truly thought, let me be clear, that this alcohol ban has been wildly misdirected since the beginning. No one has been able to explain to me exactly what the purpose of this is. I haven't found any data to support the notion that this provides major benefit to the public at large by having these alcohol bans especially in restaurants where people are congregated anyway. To me it just hasn't made a lot of sense. That said, maybe certain things just don't make sense to me. 

The next question though becomes and this is kind of more to the point, we are coming up on presumably the November 1 reopening. We are sitting here in sort of the middle to the end of October and waiting with bated breath to be sure that November 1 is going to be the reopening of Thailand with basically no quarantine or at least extremely truncated quarantine to the point where you just spend one night now after arriving and getting tested. But okay, this is going to happen November 1 but the alcohol ban is apparently according to what we are reading in various news sources, the alcohol ban is not set to be lifted until December 1 and the full spectrum of entertainment venues, and I am not talking about any specific entertainment venue, but they have said this. The alcohol ban is not going to be lifted for restaurants. It doesn't look like we are going to see bars, entertainment establishments reopening; clubs until December 1 at the earliest and I think it begs the question "is anybody going to want to really come to Thailand in that interim?" Now I am sure there are folks, especially non-immigrants, folks that live in Thailand otherwise yeah they are going to avail themselves of that immediately but are a lot of tourists going to want to come? I don't know. I have got to say if I was a tourist, I would probably think twice about going someplace that ostensibly had an alcohol ban where I wouldn't be able to get a beer sitting at the beach while eating a club sandwich. 

The reason for the video is not just to criticize. It is maybe to hopefully cause some rethinking. Maybe folks kind of say "Hey we are reopening on November 1. Maybe a break on the alcohol ban might be a good idea as we are trying to attract tourists back into the Kingdom" which is ostensibly the reason for the reopening to begin with. Hopefully I would think you know maybe cooler heads could prevail and we can see this alcohol ban lifted sooner rather than later as I can definitely say coming from correspondence and communications I have had with clients in the food and beverage sector, in various sectors throughout Thailand, the reopening is great. Everybody is happy to see this and I don't think anybody myself included are trying to be critical for criticism sake but I definitely think some rethinking should be done if we are going to open let's open and let's start attracting tourists as quickly as we can.