is the 90days/6 month rule gone?

[samak]

entered LOS today on visa waiver as usual. my accumulated days since october are more than 60 days.

nevertheless got a 30 days stamp as usual. had a friendly chat with the immigration officer in thai; he must have realized that i am here quite often... no count of days as others have reported, no check in the system...

[colorwolf]

where did you enter, suvartnabumhi or at overland crossing?

[samak]

Suvannaphum

[MooNoi]

I seriously think it is only the land borders that are policing the rule.

 

I know quite a few colleagues who come overland from Cambodia and Malaysia each month, and they say every time the pages at the land borders are counted.

 

I've watched people ahead of me in the lines at Suvannabhumi and I've never seen an immigration officer seem to count them or say anything to the person being processed. It's always been 1 or 2 minutes processing time for farangs - not enough time to count up days of people who come here a lot.

 

I've never had my pages counted either, but seeing as I have an APEC card then they wouldn't count them anyway.

 

Seeing as most people do visa runs by land, it makes more sense that they count the pages at the land borders.

[Bkkbound04]

Maybe they started over after the 1st and will do so with subsequent 6 month periods :grin: . To manage this continuously using a visual count in passports is silly if not downright stupid.Those immigration officers are not going to try and figure this out at Soowanapoom, they hate the place as it is, calculating the allwance of frequent visitor days on a 90 day out of 180 daywas fine for the first six months, I have enough trouble working out my own allowances and plans for the next six months as I've had 4 weeks already since december, I have 34 days in april and need 15 days in June.

 

 

JP

 

[Lord Toad]

Wrong. I know several people who have has problems at Bangkok airport including one guy who was refused entry and told he had to go to Malaysia and get a tourist visa.

 

This is from this weeks asiabugle:

Chaos at immigration as the first 'maximum 90 in 180 days' period comes to an end. People with several short term entries are causing huge delays as the adding up of days in and out is consigned to finger power. A colleague recently spent an hour plus at Phuket immigration; the problem was that the yachties in front regularly visited Phuket at weekends to sail. They all had been in and out on the country most weekends but were well within the 90 day limit, but the immigration officers had to count up each entry and exit and do a calculation involving fingers and bits of paper, each one taking fifteen minutes to process. The same thing happened to a good friend a few days ago at Bangkok airport. He was taken off to a side room and numbers counted and re-counted, and re-counted again by a senior officer, even though he had taken the precaution of writing and printing off a list of all entries complete with the calculation of how many days he had left. In the end he was granted his 28 day permission to stay but only after a frustrating 40 minutes. Now the big question is that, since this started on October 1st, where does the 180 days start from on April 1. Is it the last 180 calendar days? In which case the immigration officers are surely going to run out of fingers and, I suspect, toes too. Or will it all start again from April 1.

[elef]

I've some connections so I was last time picked up by an immigration officer who took me to the diplomatic passport control, still got a yellow mark on my stamp as this was the second entry within a 180 day period. Even if one immigration officer is lazy doesn't mean that the rule isn't there.

 

And what happens if a lazy officer gives you one visa exempt stamp and in a later control they'll find out that you've stayed over 90 days. IMO, they'll send you out to fix a tourist visa but probably no overstay fine.

[Nervous_Dog]

How come the computers know about a passport, 3 ago, that was lost, yet can't count days?

 

I find that odd

[elef]

Their machines just scan the bottom 1 or 2 code lines of the photo page, the stamp info is not registered.

[Bangkoktraveler]

Would having 2 passports help? For example, some from the US can get a second passport if visiting Israel whereas the first passport is used for Arab countries.