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As the title of this video suggests somebody posed me the question in person sometime back basically asking me my thoughts on a lot of these new Visa categories including things like the LTR, the Long-Term Resident Visa, which as we have discussed ad nauseam isn't really a Resident Visa it is just a really long-term visa and then things like the so-called Smart Visas or the O-X Retirement Visa; basically a lot of the innovative new Visa categories they have been kind of coming up with in the past few years, sort of comparing them to sort of what I call the "Classic" Visa categories: Business Visa, O Visa, O Visa for Marriage, O Visa for Retirement, O-A Retirement Visa, Education Visa even, standard Tourist Visa, Permanent Residence, all of these things are kind of the old regime, the classic visas. Then you have kind of seen over time, there have been these new categories which have accreted and somebody was asking my opinion on if I had any thoughts on one or the other, are the new ones better than the old ones etc.

My response to that overall is I think time will tell. Generally speaking when you see this new stuff roll out, oftentimes it will only be really useful to a really narrow subset of people or it won't seem that useful and then time will kind of go on and it will kind of shake out. I don't know how to put it any other way. You will see who can use those visas; who is going to be well suited for those visas and in certain circumstances the bureaucracy associated with them. I mean the O-X is a good example of this in the negative where okay it sounded really great but then dealing with the processing of it from a practical matter, I think just turned out to be something that was almost untenable. That being said we have seen other things introduced Thai Elite Visa for example or more specifically the sort of Thailand Elite Visa 2.0 if you will, the one that came out later, sort of the one we used to now, that Visa has proven useful and relatively popular and it has not fallen into disuse basically. 

So the thing to take away from this is my opinion, when something new comes out, especially the internet media here in Thailand is especially keen to start talking about it constantly, just take a breath, take a minute, it may take some time to see that thing become truly viable on a broad basis.