I had taken care all of my travel arrangements over 2 months ago for my upcoming odyssey to Southeast Asia, November 18-December 30, where in a 42-day period I will be visiting Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. However there was one very small loose end to take care of - since my air ticket to Thailand was for more than 30 days, I had to apply for a tourist visa with the Thai Consulate.

I thought I was catching a break as The Thailand Government was waiving the $25 fee for the tourist visa for all travel between June 2009 – March 2010. Little did I know that this small procedure would be turn out to be real hassle - call it The Passport Follies!

About a week after I sent my US passport to the Thai Consulate in Los Angeles by certified mail, I received a call from a representative at the Consulate. She advised me that they couldn’t issue the tourist visa at this time because all the visa pages in my passport were used up, so she was returning my passport to me. I would have to get extra visa pages inserted; upon accomplishing that, I was instructed to return the passport to their office for the actual visa.

After doing some research, I discovered that I had to send my passport to the Passport Office in Philadelphia. Although there was no charge for the addition of extra visa pages, in order to get the passport back in a reasonable amount of time, they suggested I pay for Expedited Service which costs $60.

Without the Expedited Service, the anticipated wait time for was up to 3 months or longer – so the decision to shell out $60 was a slam-dunk! Furthermore there was the additional expense of sending (and receiving) the passport by express mail. Of course, as soon as I receive my passport, I will have to send it to The Thai Consulate by express mail (and pay for return by express mail).

Bottom line – Total damage for adding a few measly visa pages to my passport - about $130 - includes the Expedited Service and all mailing fees, and I can expect to receive my passport (with the tourist visa) about 3-5 days before I am scheduled to depart. It looks like I’m cutting it kind of close. There is a lesson to be learned from this experience!

Tags: Passport, Tourist Visa Thailand, Travel Thailand

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 8:29 am and is filed under Commentary, Thailand, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.