Need a visa for another country? Check out our Travel Visa Guide
*Update as of September 2013: we ended up applying for a 60-day Thai visa in Kuala Lumpur, which cost £22.25 each. Since then we’ve also extended this by 30 days at the immigration office in Chiang Mai for £36 each.
Thailand finds its way onto the itineraries and then into the hearts of many travellers; according to the Thai Tourism Ministry 800,000 British people alone visit the country each year. We spent a month backpacking around Thailand in 2009 and fell in love with the country and the travelling lifestyle – in fact, it was then that we decided to start saving for our big round the world travel adventure. So, it’s no surprise that Thailand is firmly on our list of countries to visit on our trip, in fact, we hope to spend a few months at a time travelling and living in Thailand; so what kind of visa do we need?
Many travellers manage to stay in Thailand for a few months at a time by getting visas in advance or renewing there’s by doing a Thailand visa run across the border to Laos or Cambodia before crossing back over to Thailand.
Thailand visa on arrival – if you’re from an exemption country, you can get a 30-day Thai visa on arrival, as long as you fly into the country; if you arrive overland you can only get a 15 day visa. To be eligible for this visa you need:
Under this visa you can leave and re-enter the country, as long as you don’t spend more than 90 days in Thailand within a six month period. So, we could enter on this visa and theoretically stay for three months at a time, as long as we fly into and out of the country and spend no more than 30 days there at one time.
60 day tourist visa Thailand – this type of visa allows you to stay in Thailand for 60 days at a time. You’ll need to make this type of Thai visa application within three months of visiting the country and provide the following:
We’ve heard of people who even managed to get double entry visas by crossing over to another country after their thirty days were up and getting another 60 day visa.
Although Thailand visa requirements for UK citizens are quite lenient, we cannot apply for the 60 day visa more than three months in advance; so that means applying in either Indonesia or the Philippines. We’re not yet sure whether you can only apply for the 60 day visa in your country of origin, but we’ll investigate this once we get to Indonesia. Since we have family visiting us in Thailand for the whole of August and most of September, worst case scenario is that we may have to enter and re-enter the country on a 30 day visa. We’ll update this page once we finally manage to get our Thai visas.
Check out our Travel Visa Guide for more advice.
*Information is accurate as of November 2012