Foreign tourists swarm into Thailand

Immigration officials at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok are struggling to cope with the crescendo of foreign tourists flooding into Thailand. Pictures of the jampacked airport taken on Sunday, October 20, reveal a promising outlook for Thailand’s tourist High Season, which runs from November to April.

Between 1pm-5pm on Sunday, 76 flights landed on the airport’s runway, an average of 20 flights per hour. An average of 3,000 – 4,000 foreign tourists per hour passed through immigration that day, according to the Spokesperson for the Immigration Bureau Mj Gen Choengron Rimphadee. It is by the far the busiest the airport has been since before the pandemic.

To ensure that arrivals didn’t have to wait longer than one hour at immigration, all immigration booths were staffed and officers spent no longer than 45 seconds checking the passport data, visa status, personal biometric data,…