Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing, well arrival and departure cards. I thought of making this video after reading a recent comment on our channel, quoting directly: "When I came back to Thailand last week, they did not ask me to fill out an entry card so now I don't have one in my passport, first time ever. They didn't explain why. I actually thought that's what this video was about. I forget the number of that document, hee, hee." So this was on a prior video where we were talking about I think extension cards and cards associated with TM30 etc. and address reporting and that type of thing. 

Yeah the arrival/departure card we did do a video on this going back I don't know it's been a while but yeah those have been phased out. At the beginning when they phased it out they said it was essentially a temporary measure but at the time I even speculated that it looked like they were probably they were going to go ahead and just do that. I suspect that we are probably never going to see arrival/departure cards come back. I kind of hope we don't; they were in my opinion rather redundant, kind of annoying. Thais have to keep them in their passport when they go abroad and foreigners have to keep them in when they are here in Thailand; it's kind of a cumbersome system, let me put it that way. 

So what's going on though? I mean what about the function of the arrival/departure card? Well as noted in a prior video when we discussed this in the past I think effectively biometrics has phased this out, so they have biometric readers at Immigration checkpoints when coming into Thailand. Basically that goes ahead and sort of deals with it. So no need for the arrival and departure card. All you get is an entry stamp now, no longer having those put into your passport. I suspect it has saved Immigration a bunch of money too because they don't to print out the cards, they don't have to have staplers so much or use so many staples, just a lot of different things that would go into cost savings associated with getting rid of the actual physical arrival and departure cards here in the Kingdom of Thailand.