Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the addition of even more nationalities being added to the roster of those folks who are allowed into Thailand Visa-free. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Phuket News, that is thephuketnews.com, the article is titled: Airports prepare to implement visa-free policy. Quoting directly: "BANGKOK: The Government has set up a command centre to welcome tourists from India and Taiwan under the Visa-free entry policy that will begin tomorrow (November 10)." So again, a little bit of old news here but it is worth noting that India and Taiwan have now been added to the ranks of those passport holders who will be allowed to come to Thailand and enter without a Visa beforehand; they can basically come in Visa-free, Visa-exempt as we have discussed. 

Now as I have discussed in other videos, there has been a lot of talk about where forthcoming tourists are going to spring from if you will. One thing that I think perhaps caught people by surprise coming out of the pandemic is India has proven to be a major source of tourists for Thailand and we are seeing more and more of them coming and quite honestly they are turning out to be a pretty beneficial source of tourists for Thailand. Now again, like with many nationalities, they may have different sort of priorities when it comes to the things that they want to enjoy about tourism here and they may not be the exact same priorities of tourists in the past, so there may be a difference in sort of the things that will attract Indian tourists and tourists from Taiwan as well. Again this is sort of indicative of the changing nature of the Tourism Sector in Thailand that where once it was kind of a, honestly the Tourism Sector tended to focus on Western tourists and then there was a big change with the influx of Chinese tourists, roughly throughout the past decade, which that kind of came to an end with the imposition of lockdowns and the pandemic response. Then now coming out of that, we are sort of seeing where with China's economy having some problems kind of heating back up, we are not seeing the same numbers of Chinese tourists down here in Thailand but we are seeing tourists from other places, in fact from places we haven't seen the levels and volume that we have seen from certain markets now here in 2023 going into 2024 and India is one of those markets, I don't think there is any doubt about that. 

That said, I think that this is good news all around; good news for everybody, people that want to come to Thailand to relax, have a good time, especially going into this high season. I think it is also good news for Thailand as more tourists presumably means more revenue and if you are looking at it from a Government perspective, more revenue means the possibility of more taxes which is primarily what Governments are concerned about. So it is kind of a win-win for everyone; it looks like positive things on the horizon. We will certainly keep you updated on this channel as the situation evolves.