Transcript of the above video:

In approximately about a week's time, we're going to be looking at the APEC Summit here in Thailand. Pretty major thing. I'm a little bit ambivalent about some of these International meetups. I just often wonder, I sometimes wonder what it is they do there and quite frankly I wonder if it's particularly good when they meet up because the last few years it seems like all anybody was meeting up to do was figure out how to keep everybody's economy shut down or completely moribund, so whatever but one man's opinion.

That said APEC is coming. APEC Summit is happening here in Bangkok. It is a pretty big deal and there's a lot going on with respect to that which got me, I thought of making this video after reading recent article in the Thai Examiner, that's thaiexaminer.com, the article is titled: Flight connectivity dogs tourism recovery as Immigration Bureau warns travellers of delays. Quoting directly: “Thai Authorities are warning passengers over the coming weeks arriving in Thailand to expect delays when being processed at Suvarnabhumi airport. This is because of tightened security as Thailand hosts the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit on November 18th and 19th. It comes as the number of arrivals in the Kingdom is growing although there has been a problem attracting long-haul tourists with 72% of visits coming from lower spenders in the short-haul market. It is a trend that may continue as the country lags behind its peers in Asia in getting back to the level of pre-pandemic flight connectivity that led it to a record year in 2019 with 40 million tourists aided by lower economy fares. This number is expected to be approximately 11 million this year with the latest news being that the Tourism Authority of Thailand has only projected 18 million visitors in 2023 as its 'base' figure." Yeah, again to requote the main point here: "this is because of tightened security as Thailand hosts the Asia-Pacific Cooperation Summit." So yeah I think in the next probably 10 days as we are going into this Summit next week and then as it winds down and it's going out, yeah I think inbound travel, maybe even outbound travel there for a little while, will probably be a little slower in getting through Immigration, a little bit slower in getting out through Immigration just because they have got all these extra folks that are processing. On top of it, when you have all these major world leaders come somewhere, there's all kinds of protocols internally having to do with the airport, immigration; people coming in on diplomatic documentation; that all causes kind of an extra workload on the overall system and then that as a result can have sort of knock on effects for the folks who are just wanting to come in as tourists. 

So now do I think this is going to be like a massive up ending of the Immigration system? Not really because they really are not at full capacity with respect to resource usage anyway. We are still, as they noted in that article, I mean 2019 Thai Immigration was handling 40 million arrivals a year. Now we are down to a quarter, maybe half of that by the end of the year, or into 2023 if things go really, really well. Well I would presume that as a result of that we're going to see an Immigration system which has the resources to handle the workload. That said for those who have been kind of used to a rather fast-paced maybe brisk time coming through Thai Immigration the past few months, which I have been told it is pretty darn easy, and easy is a word I don't use often in the context of Immigration but perhaps over the course of the next 10 days or so, that's probably not going to be the case. Things are going to be a little slower as we are kind of all dealing with this APEC Summit that is going to come and go here again in the next 10 days.