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ResourcesVisa & Immigration LawThailand Immigration LawExtension of A 30 Day Thai Visa Exemption Stamp

Extension of A 30 Day Thai Visa Exemption Stamp

Transcript of the above video:

In this video we're going to follow up a prior video with respect to the 30-day exemption stamp and specifically we are going to discuss extending the 30-day exemption stamp.

So a little history here is probably in order. In the past, it was not possible really, well it was rather difficult and it was done on a rather sort of ad-hoc basis to extend a 30-day visa exemption here in the Kingdom and when I'm talking about a 30-day visa exemptions I recommend individuals watching this video and hearing about these terms for the first time to check out another video on our channel with respect to specifically too detailed information regarding the 30-day exemption stamp. Basically the 30-day exemption stamp is not a visa; it's simply 30 days of lawful status in the Kingdom. In the past there was sort of an ad hoc way the immigration officials would just go ahead and sometimes issue and sometimes not extensions in that status. Sometimes they would let people convert out of that status into other visa statuses and then extend those visas, in many cases "no" it is left to officer discretion. In some cases officers feel like, well there's no reason to force that person to leave, let's just go ahead and extend it here, it's just going to be more economical in terms of time and resources. You see that a lot with respect to medical visas where there's been an emergency and the immigration apparatus uses their discretion to sort of act in an equitable way with respect to the issuance of an extension. That was in the past. Now that is more a hard and fast rule with respect to extensions and now it's basically the payment of 1,900 Baht, at the time of this filming, will allow an individual to extend by another 30 days their exemption status. But that's it. It’s 30 days and then done; that’s all you get. You can’t extend any further and it’s been my experience and in virtually every case I have seen where such an extension has occurred after arrival into the Kingdom on a 30 day stamp. It's basically a situation where they're not going to let you convert into anything else because they figure” look if you really want to be here go out, get the proper visa, come back in”. In fact over all since the institution, the program so-called "Good Guys in Bad Guys Out", it’s been sort of a sea change in terms of immigration policy law and enforcement, we have seen just the overall ad-hoc behavior of allowing conversion sometimes of 30-day status, it's effectively entirely gone by the wayside. Conversion from 30-day status now into some sort of non-immigrant category I haven't seen it happen very often. Again, there are extenuating circumstances, immigration officers are human. They can listen to a narrative with extenuating circumstances and if they feel it is compelling enough they can issue a visa conversion notwithstanding the fact that the individual entered in 30-day status. Again it happens quite frequently with respect to medical visas especially for someone who is in an emergency situation. But that being said, day-to-day routine situations don’t happen as a matter of course. They want to see those individuals leave, process a proper visa application through an Embassy or Consulate abroad, come back in in the proper status and go from there. The thing to take away however from this video is it is possible to extend for a one-time 30 days the initial 30 days, so one can get a total of 60 days lawful status in the Kingdom. They need to go ahead and deal with an Immigration Office directly and they need to go ahead and fill out the proper forms and get that visa extended but it is possible, it can be done and for some it can be a significant benefit as there are unforeseen situations that occur even with respect to vacationing. Somebody finds that "look we really like Thailand more than we ever could have imagined, we can bump our flights out by a couple of weeks, let's go get a 30-day extension stamp". It is quite a nice thing especially now that they've sort of regularized the adjudication process and there are many who enjoy it on a yearly basis.