Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing travel rules associated with coming into Thailand. Right now anybody who has been dealing with trying to travel into Thailand, some of our clients who have had us assist them, you have got to deal with Thailand Pass, Insurance; depending on the Visa you are getting even more insurance. There is a lot of documentation, there are a lot of hoops to jump through just to come to Thailand and in most cases, people want to come to Thailand for vacation.

I keep thinking of that film The Fifth Element where they go to Fhloston Paradise. It is basically a planet that is just one giant resort and then they have like a spaceship that is like a cruise ship that is spinning around it. I just remember that and when you came off, it was just paradise, it just looked great. That is what people want when they come to Thailand. They are not looking for an experience with the DMV (the Department of Motor Vehicles); for those who are unaware, sort of American colloquialisms, but they are not interested in dealing with this massive bureaucracy just to get in the country and be poked and pinched and prodded on their way in. It is kind of a classic situation where to quote the late President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, "Government isn't the solution to our problems; Government is the problem." That is a little bit off base insofar as yes there are certain things Government does well. At the beginning of this when Thailand imposed quarantine, they weren't sure what this was, I will be the first to admit I thought it was the right thing to do in that moment. The other thing I will say and looking back on it, I keep saying this over and over, many other countries use the word quarantine. Thailand to the best of my knowledge, was one of the few countries that did a real quarantine. They shut out their own citizens from coming back because these things don't follow nationality; a quarantine is you shut down, you seal it off and that is what they did and I thought if you are going to do it, that is the right way to do it. In America they kept using the term quarantine but that isn't what they were doing. They were letting in many people that were coming from places that had already confirmed to have this issue in those jurisdictions. 

So the point of this video though is we are seeing a lot of other countries here in Southeast Asia begin to open up. I am doing other videos contemporaneously with this one that we will be rolling out where we compare other countries in the region to Thailand itself but I kind of wanted to make this one as sort of a preface and basically say look yeah, I think Thailand really needs to look at changing up the entry protocols and just really all the mass bureaucracy associated with entering the country in any context and really rethink this because look economically we need to turn this thing around. I have already done videos where I have talked about how 20% of overall GDP was based on tourism prior to quarter one of 2020 and after that it has gone down to as low as like almost 2%, so that is a 90% loss of 20% of your overall GDP. That is like having your guts kicked out as a country economically. We need whatever we can get. It is time to move on, my opinion, it is time to move on and look at this thing for what it is and start making some more reasonable decisions and letting people in and stop being again my opinion, just overly hysterical about this thing especially in light of the fact that they are revising the fatality numbers fatality numbers downwards and we are seeing that the current iteration of this is quite frankly not the deadly thing that it once was, comparatively, I will put it that way. So again maybe it is time for Thailand to seriously consider whether or not these policies are making it substantially uncompetitive in the Tourism Market.