Following yesterday’s widely reported story of a shift to hardened policy regarding punishments for visitors overstaying their visa end-date in Thailand, several new stories have surfaced that try to rebut the original claims, and a war of credibility has broken out between the kingdom’s foreign-language media services.  Unfortunately too, the official sources have damaged their [...]

News leaked today indicates the Royal Thai Immigration Police are to usher in a new era of punishment for visitors who overstay their visa or other travel document permitting them to enter the kingdom. There has long been a standing fine for staying beyond the expiry date of the permission-to-enter stamp in one’s passport – [...]

Effective 21 December 2009, the application fee for a work-permit in Thailand rose by 600%. There are two fees to be paid for a work-permit in Thailand, an application fee, and a successor issuance fee.  The former is controlled and set by the Work Permit Section of the Employment Division of the Ministry of Labour.  [...]

eBay’s top Chiang Mai sellers and their SE Asian seller management team met at the Chiang Mai Holiday Inn yesterday (23 Feb 2009) to exchange information about the marketplace, its policies, and current sales performance.

Presentations were also given by international courier DHL and a new service for sellers to manage their multi-national sales marketing – Global MerchantRun. PayPal SE Asia also attended and presented information. A buffet style dinner was provided by the Holiday Inn for early arrivers.

Of the 30 or so sellers in attendance, approximately half were foreign expatriates resident in Chiang Mai and trading from here. This is a stark contrast to the eBay team’s last visit to Chiang Mai, in 2006, when they held a seminar for all levels of buyers. That earlier meeting was predominantly Thai attendees with only a handful of foreigners. Could this disparity in ratio be indicative that Thai sellers are not succeeding on the platform?

Having moved house, the law in Thailand says that foreigners must advise the Immigration Police of their new address within 24 hours of the move. The same time span applies to even tourists moving from one hotel to another, although usually the hotel takes care of that.

TOT’s mistrust of its subscribers is causing foreigners in Thailand to pay unnecessary costs, receive continued billing long after requesting service termination, and is leading to loss of property rental deposits.

Foreigners renting property in Thailand, a country which prohibits all foreigners from land ownership, are subjected to prejudicial policies and serious levels of punative charges when subscribing to the Telephone Organisation of Thailand’s (TOT’s) ADSL broadband internet service.

I was told a long time ago that part of the reason Thailand is called “The Land of Smiles” is not because so many people smile so much of the time, but because Thais have over 1,000 different identified smiles, each for a different situation. After almost a decade living here, I reckon I can [...]

The breakage of the three trunk undersea cables in the Mediterranean between Sicily and Tunisia has dropped Internet bandwidth between Europe and Asia to 10% of normal capacity, as Telco’s and ISPs frantically try to reroute connections through the USA. Users in SE Asia are reporting connections as slow as 5 bps with up to 100% transmission packet loss on some browse and email connection attempts.