Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the fact that nobody really wants to do a bunch of paperwork when they go on vacation. The reason I thought of making this video, I was reading a recent article from the Pattaya Mail, pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Compulsory Insurance could survive abolition of Thailand Pass. We have discussed that at length. There is some talk of getting rid of Thailand Pass but then keeping some of these other provisions. I am going to go ahead and quote and then I will kind of get into my analysis here. Quoting directly: "If the Center for COVID-19 Situation Administration this week were to accept the proposal to have ongoing Insurance, extra delays would occur when passengers checked in for their flights because staff would need to ascertain their paperwork was in order, or risk being fined by Bangkok Authorities. This happened under the now defunct “Test and Go” procedures when Airlines had to ensure that Thai-bound passengers had their downloaded QR code. Some Airlines initially refused to board people who did not have it an onward ticket for flights out of Thailand." 

Yeah look, what they are talking about here is even if you get rid of Thailand Pass we are still going to have like an insurance requirement, these testing requirements and documentation requirements. Nobody wants to go on vacation with enough paperwork to basically file their tax return. It is just not what people want to do. I don't want to go on vacation like that, nobody does. I really don't know where the disconnect is here at this point. I do understand, I am not going to get too into going after bureaucrats or whatever, but it does seem like that there is a disconnect. There is a group of people at a policy level making decisions or implementing them and not really thinking about the fact of who they are dealing with. If we were talking about customs and bills of lading, these are things that happen all the time with the import-export business for example but when you are talking about an economy such as Thailand’s which has 20% of its GDP was based on tourism prior to quarter one of 2020 and we have lost all of that. We have done the videos on that where it went from 20% of GDP down to like 1.8% of GDP or it went from 18% of GDP to like 1.8% of GDP. Tourists are not going to want to go through all these hoops. Now they will probably put up with for a little bit more of the foreseeable future but not much. The other thing that I have discussed in other videos is look people are going to be booking for High Season now in the summer of '22 to come in the winter of '22 in what you would call the winter in the West, the High season here in Thailand. We need to be scrapping this stuff sooner rather than later because people are just going to look at the situation and say "Yeah, I don't want to do that. I don't want to put together a dossier of documents I have to carry all with me and be poked and prodded to give them these documents so I can just go and relax." People will say "I am going to go somewhere else."

So I really hope, I don't blame anybody for the policies up to this point because I think reasonable people may disagree on how long it has gone but you could make an argument that hey this was required in its time. Its time has come to an end. That is ending I think now and when this becomes endemic and we see the end of the Emergency Decree, it is time to put this behind us because if we don't and we continue with this excessively cumbersome sort of paperwork processing just to get into Thailand, we are going to see a lot of people just say "I don't want to come to Thailand", and I don't want to see that. I'm a Thai, I love Thailand, I made this my home, I really hope we think past just this moment now, think into the future and realize we are going to have to change this. We are going to have to change it sooner rather than later.