Transcript of the above video:

The news I have been reading in the past few weeks about Immigration to Thailand, now things were looking really good in December, I will be the first one to say it and then they seem to take a sharp turn quite frankly for the worse when it comes to being able to get into Thailand; ease of travel etc. 

A recent article, this came from ASEAN NOW, that is aseannow.com, the article is titled: Deadline for arrivals under Thailand's "Test and Go" scheme may be extended to mid-January. It is a bit of an older article but that is really not the thrust of this video. This just caught me off guard. They were citing Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul. Quoting directly: "He made clear that it is not possible to extend the deadline to February or April as suggested by some tourism business operators explaining that the Government is focusing on "quality tourists", not on the numbers."

Well I found that very strange because I don't see where there are hardly are going to be any tourists now that we don't have "Test and Go", so quality or otherwise we are not really going to see a lot of numbers. As we have discussed in other videos, going back we cited the Bangkok Post noting that like 2018 tourism was roughly 20% of GDP, Gross Domestic Product in Thailand. In the first half of 2021 it was less than 2%, I just rounded up and said it was 2%. If we continue on this course the way we are going right now we are probably in line for about the same amount of numbers, maybe lower because it leads back in 2021 there was still arguably some momentum. In fact last year's "High Season", was actually a little bit more open and yeah they shut back down, they went into a second lockdown, but high season actually, I thought it was a little bit more exuberant in going from 2020 to 2021 than frankly I saw it from going 2021 to 2022, especially after the suspension of "test and go". Things were looking really good up until December 21, 2021. 

Moving forward I don't know exactly what this means but I will say that this notion of "quality tourists" versus "numbers" seems a little bit odd in light of the fact that we are really not seeing much of any tourists under current circumstances.