Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Thai Retirement Visas specifically the O-A Retirement Visa. I have had a few people ask me the last couple of weeks what does O-A, the designation O-A mean? And it actually got me thinking because I have been here 15 years and while you can get caught up in the day-to-day, there are times when I will sit and I will think back to when I was first here, just things I overheard, things people were talking about, things I saw on the internet at that time and this kind of percolated to the surface and caused me to make this video. 

So, it has always been my understanding O-A means "O" which is the categorization under which Retirement Visas fall and then the dash "A" meant Annual, that's how I always understood it. I can actually remember and I went digging because it was on a forum, it was on one of two forums, I couldn't remember which one, I went digging around looking for it trying to make this video but I couldn't find it. There was a time when, there were a few people I remember specifically saying O-A meant Retirement Visas issued abroad because you can only get an O-A issued at an Embassy or Consulate abroad. I can remember this, there was a time when people would say "oh, that A stands for 'Abroad'. Now it's pretty much universally accepted it stands for "Annual". It has always been my understanding it stood for "Annual" but I can kind of remember people talking about that. It's in kind of the ether of my mind but it was always at a time going back 2008, ‘09, ‘10 when a lot of Thai Immigration was far more nebulous than it is now. The internet was not nearly sophisticated as it is now. There was just quite frankly a lot of misinformation floating around the internet at that time regarding Thai Immigration so maybe that was just something I saw in the detritus of the internet and it just wasn't ever true, but it was what someone thought and kind of made sense within the narrative, it begins with A, abroad begins with A, okay, makes sense. 

Long story short, as a practical matter what does the O-A mean today versus the Thai O Retirement Visa? Well the O-A, the fundamental difference is you need insurance in order to get the O-A Visa, health insurance of a certain level and you need insurance to maintain it in an extension capacity. An O Retirement Visa on the other hand does not have those requirements. So as a practical matter today that's the difference. As far as the O-A itself it is kind of irrelevant in a sense. I kind of suspect Thai Immigration doesn't even really care. It's just the designation within sort of their catalogue of visas just so they know how to categorize it. In a sense it could have been called the PDFq Visa or the XYZ Visa, it is really kind of irrelevant but what it refers to specifically is a type of Retirement Visa here in Thailand, it is issued abroad, it can be extended here but the big difference between it and the O Retirement Visa is the O-A requires insurance coverage.