Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the Thai E-Visa Portal. This is kind of a new development in the Thai Immigrations space. We are going to go ahead and throw up the homepage to this online.

I want to go ahead and read an email I got from a viewer on this topic. Quoting directly: "Dear Ben, Here is a link below to the new Visa system." Thanks for that. We did have this queued up but your email as I am going to get into here provided a lot of insight. Quoting further: "For many like myself who are older and retired many are not capable of dealing with these websites. In the past it was somewhat easy doing everything by mail. With this, I do not even know where to start or even understand how we receive our visas either by mail or whatever. This system makes it so much more difficult for many without either smartphones or note books. Perhaps you can do a video on the subject." He goes on in there. I am going to do another video contemporaneously with this one discussing some more specific topics. 

Long story short, yeah it has been my experience, for example the US Travel Doc System, the VFS system, the addition of these digital systems does not create an overall process which is in my opinion overly more convenient. Especially for those who are not digital savvy, it can really be a cumbersome process and this is definitely not a situation that I particularly like. I know a lot of people think "The lawyers are going to love it, it makes it harder!" Candidly, things getting harder does not necessarily mean that lawyers make a bunch more money or something like this. In fact kind of the opposite. The more difficult it gets, the more cumbersome it is, clients it leaves a bad taste in their mouth dealing with the whole thing. Goodwill is an integral part of dealing with your clients and when you have kind of a bad taste left in someone's mouth because of the way you had to deal with all this conversion online processing for things that could very easily be done by paper and have been done by paper for a long period of time, it is not a good situation.

We are still getting used to this system ourselves. I can tell you the head of our Immigration division is not in love with this process by a darn sight, not in love with this portal at all. I overhear her from the other side of the office occasionally sort of making some expletives in Thai, put it that way, about this system. 

We will keep you updated on this channel on this topic but for now suffice it to say we are a little bit nonplussed by the addition of this new system.