The spike in recent cases sucks ... a couple headlines from the past few days
"In just 3 weeks Thailand has recorded nearly twice the number of new infections than the whole of 2020."
"Thai hotels consider temporary shutdown amid low tourist demand"
On a pretty positive note for any of you planning to come any time soon, they just launched a website entrythailand.go.th which is amazingly helpful. I can't tell you how much I wish this had been created when I went through this. It spells out all the steps needed with checklists, etc. It's actually a pretty well designed website. I didn't read everything on it, but looked around a bit and it seems comprehensive and clear to follow. Just getting clarity on all the requirements was the hardest part for me and this looks to eliminate a lot of that.
It's a bit humorous to see the order of some of the steps a bit different and that I did certain things out of order - I worked with the Thai Embassy to make my checklist and followed their guidance. This website seems to have served a secondary function of getting the actual rules documented not only for us, but for the authorities.
Additionally, there is a full list of ASQ hotels with basic marketing information for each location in a consistent format for quick review. There aren't good filters on the site (i.e. has balcony, has washing machine, etc.) but this will fast track your search a great deal. There are similar websites out there put together by various travel websites, but those were pretty hit and miss - they didn't include all hotels, search functions didn't always work, etc. The consistent format of this site and the ability to see all the locations in one spot is huge.
I still recommend using this website to shortlist where you would potentially stay and then contact the hotel separately, as many were open to negotiate rates down with occupancy rates low at many. There were a handful of higher priced hotels that wouldn't budge and a few other that seemed to offer really competitive prices relative to their competition that didn't need to discount, but the rest did.
I spent countless hours working around there not being tools like these two, so these should fast track any planning you might do. The "one stop shop" aspect of this is great. Enjoy. | |
