E-visa and visa drop boxes in India will help tourism

Malaysia has just passed the one million mark for tourists entering Thailand, and officials are eyeing India as the next million-tourists source and hope that introducing e-visas will help. With more airlines planning to launch new routes from various cities in India to Thailand, the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) expect the number of Indian travellers entering Thailand to continue to grow. Many Tier-2 cities in India are launching new flights to Thailand to meet demand.

By the end of last month, more than half a million tourists had come from India to Thailand. According to a Bangkok Post report, 561,656 Indians were recorded entering the kingdom so far this year. Tourism experts expect to see that number swell in the fourth quarter of 2022 as travel increases to Thailand.

The Business Travel Trade Agency of India conducts a tracker of public sentiment frequently. Thailand is at the top of the list for Indians considering a short-haul trip and 66% of people ranked Thailand as their number one desired destination.

The TAT is hoping for help pushing the Asian market like India to Thailand by making the visa process easier for them. The Deputy Governor of Marketing for Asia and the South Pacific for the TAT says e-visas are the key. Adopting e-visas would make it easy for short-haul countries that require visas to travel to Thailand.

The government had been testing the e-visa process for travellers from China, but that experiment was cut short by Covid-19 closing borders. The TAT says restarting the programme would open the floodgates for many travellers mired by convoluted bureaucracy. Foreigners often complain about how difficult it is to contact and deal with consulates and embassies.

“Tourists weren’t worried about the visa fee, but they were more concerned about the inconvenient process.”

The Asia Pacific deputy governor says that while China is still rebounding from Covid, India with nearly the same amount of people and potential travellers is ready to come, but struggling with the visa process. China has far more embassies and consulates than India of a similar population size, so it can be difficult to apply for a visa to travel to Thailand. With an e-visa process in place, those problems would disappear.

Meanwhile, on the ground in India, the Times of India reports that the Thai government is making it a bit easier to get the physical visa that’s required for now. A programme called VFS Global will maintain drop boxes for Thai visa applications in 11 of these Tier-2 cities around the country.

Indian people can apply for visas on arrival but are only permitted to stay for 15 days. Those looking to travel longer have had to trek to embassies to apply for a visa in India. There were a handful of dropbox services in the Indian cities of Agra, Amritsar, Bhubaneswar, Dehradun, Guwahati, Jaipur, Jamshedpur, Ludhiana, Patna, Siliguri, and Visakhapatnam already.

But the new expansion adds 11 more locations where local citizens can apply to travel from India to Thailand. Those cities are:

• Aurangabad
• Bhopal
• Coimbatore
• Indore
• Lucknow
• Mangalore
• Nagpur
• Nasik
• Ranchi
• Thiruvananthapuram
• Vijayawada

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