Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are posing the question, Indonesia's ending their visa free entry?  So I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Nation, that's nationthailand.com, the article is titled: End of visa-free facility for 159 countries will not hurt Indonesian tourism. Quoting directly: "The end of a facility that allowed visitors from dozens of countries to enter Indonesia without a Visa will not hurt the tourist industry and will instead improve the quality of Tourism, the Tourism Minister has said." Quoting further: "A Law and Human Rights Ministry Decree signed on June 7 has suspended the visa-free facility for 159 countries, though it remains in place for the country's 10 ASEAN neighbors." That is notable, I will get into that in a moment. Quoting further: "Immigration Director-General Silmy Karim said in a press statement released on Sunday that his office would gradually add more countries to the VOA list. "Even if visa exemption facilities are reinstated later", he said candidate countries must meet the three criteria of reciprocity, benefiting Indonesia and "security aspects" for inclusion on the list." So again, a lot going on here.

The long story short is the fact that yeah it looks like they are going to some kind of more automated system but it's going to be a visa-on-arrival rather than an exemption system. I didn't quite fully understand that and to be clear I am not any type of expert or have any expertise on Indonesian Immigration. I saw the article and as folks may realize, I do some videos sometimes for other ASEAN countries because again as noted in other videos, people may come to Thailand as tourists or whatever or folks doing business in this region may bounce around and they may end up going to these other places, so from time to time I go ahead and do a video on that. Notably, nothing has changed with respect to ASEAN passport holders so those with a passport from the ASEAN countries down here in Southeast Asia; this doesn't really have anything to do with you but with respect to folks from outside the Southeast Asia region, yeah it looks like you are dealing with a different set of protocols through the Immigration facilities in Indonesia.