Re: [103all] Visas for IETF 103 in Thailand

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On Aug 15, 2018, at 21:18, Mikael Abrahamsson <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> "1.     Foreign nationals wishing to enter the Kingdom of Thailand to attend a MICE event, which is endorsed or sponsored by TCEB, without being employed or working for income, are regarded as tourists”

Thanks Mikael for this find — that is exactly what I was asking for.
That is the kind of information the secretariat/meeting organization should collect and make available.
(And make sure we are endorsed/sponsored by the TCEB — are we?)

> Having spent a total of over a year and traveled in and out of thailand a non-trivial amount of time, I'd recommend to make things easier for everybody and just say you're going there for tourism if you're a passport holder from one of those 55 countries. If someone questions that, point to above rule and say you interpreted it as you should say tourism. Apologise profusely for the mix-up.

Let me tell a story about this: There is a check box on a US visa waiver form that asks “have you ever had a visa canceled?”.

Now, I started going to the US regularly when Germans still needed visa, and at the time I was too young for a permanent one, so I got one that lasted only a couple of years.  Later, when I went for a trip that might have gone beyond the end date of that visa, I finally got a permanent one, and my time-limited one (which was still valid for a couple more months) was canceled.  Some time later, when the visa waiver program became active, at first I continued to travel with my permanent visa, until one day an immigration officer just wrote a big “canceled” on top of that (I must have let out a big gasp) and said I didn’t need that any more.

OK, so the next time I entered, I did have to use the visa waiver program, and I dutifully put my check mark for “have you ever had a visa canceled” on the true answer: Yes (actually, by then I had that happen twice to me).  Of course, I turned up in “that room” after briefly talking to the usual immigration officer.  After about two hours later, an immigration officer told me off in no uncertain terms to never make that check mark in the check box again and sent me on to my meeting.

How should I have known that the expected answer to that question was not the truth, but the expedient answer?
That was a highly learnable moment.

Grüße, Carsten