UPDATE: SOME OF THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN CLARIFIED AND CORRECTED:
- The 180-day extension can be done once per entry, not just once over the course of the 5-year visa. That means a maximum of 360 days of continuous stay per entry.
- The DTV is NOT one-time visa. You can apply for it again after 5 years if you want to do it again. Of course, the visa could be scrapped and canceled before then; since it’s just being rolled out now, this is the plan for now, but Thai visa regulations change frequently.
- For the most up-to-date info, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfy6zvvekkE
Notes from Tourism Authority Thailand Event – Digital Nomad Visas / Other Topics – 5 July, 2024
Introductory Remarks – Key Points
- From January – 30 June, 17.5 million tourists in Thailand – exactly ½ of annual goal
- Tourism numbers not so important; revenue generated from those numbers more important
- Thai government actively wants some visitors to stay longer
- Bangkok currently #1 on nomad list, Chiang Mai #2!!
- The speaker wanted to assure us of improvements in two areas moving forward:
- Ease of traveling: Visa extensions and longer stays
- Ease of doing business.
- We are now back to pre-pandemic numbers of flights to Thailand overall, although some particular market segments have not recovered fully yet.
Lecture by Mr. Naruchai Ninnad About the DTV Visa and Other Visa Info – Key Points
DTV Details
- 5 years – multiple entry. That means this visa you can come in and go out of Thailand for five years, starting from the date of visa issuance.
- The length of stay is different than the visa validity. The length of stay for each time is 180 days. You can extend that for another 180 days per entry, for a maximum continuous stay of 360 days in Thailand per entry. Then you have to leave and come back again.
- Visa fees are 10,000 baht. Apply at Royal Thai Embassy or Royal Thai Consulate, or online at Thai e-visa.
- The visa will be available within 15 days from 5 July, 2024
- Intended for 3 groups:
- Work and leisure remote workers, freelancers, digital nomads.
- Muay Thai, Thai cooking, seminars, music festivals etc.
- Families of DTV visa holders – you can bring a spouse and dependent children under 20 years old.
- Visa Requirements:
- Financial evidence: amount of no less than 500,000 thai baht. Can supply any financial documents that will guarantee that you have 500,000 baht. When applying and extending, you need to show that money. That money does not need to stay in your account during your time in Thailand And you can show, for example, a bank account, a retirement investment account, or any proof of finances, any combination of funds.
- Passport or travel documents
- Photograph
- Document indicating current location
- Proof of employment in another country, such as employment contract or portfolio (if you don’t have a work contract, you can show your portfolio.)
- If doing a course, a letter confirming acceptance.
- If you are a family member of a DTV applicant, proof that you’re family, such as a marriage certificate or birth certificate.
- You can apply for the DTV more than once – after 5 years you can reapply and get it again.
- DTV must be applied for outside of Thailand
- Will DTV visa holders be taxed? No! ←This is verbatim what the speaker, Mr. Ninnad, said. However, the following conversation between him and a person who asked a question also occurred during the Q & A session:
Questioner: So, digital nomads will probably be going to the border after 6 months and coming back, and that means they’ll have to pay tax.
Mr. Ninnad: Yes if you receive your income from here, ye.s If you do not bring your income here, you receive it from abroad, from another country, you don’t have to pay tax.
Questioner: But that’s the new rule that the Thai revenue department are trying to bring in. Worldwide income, same as American—
Mr. Ninnad: Ok, ok. Ok we’re talking about worldwide income, we would have to say to that, if they bring the worldwide income into calculation, then…
Questioner: Say someone is over 50, they don’t work, they don’t want to get a retirement visa…[etc. – new question]
In other words, this conversation leaves things quite ambivalent in terms of a.) whether new regulations the revenue department is trying to bring in, will take effect or not and b.) what exactly those potential new regulations on “worldwide income” or “income brought into Thailand” will mean for taxation for people who stay longer than 180 days in a calendar year.
Timeframes for New Visa Regulations
Within July
- 60-day visa exemption scheme will be implemented + additional 30 days extension!
- Normally when you enter Thailand visa-free, you get 30 days + optional 30-day extension at the immigration office. Now instead of a total 60 days, there will be a total 90 days visa-free!
- Visa on Arrival
- DTV visa
- Non-ED Plus
- These measures have already been approved and will be in place within a couple of weeks
- New tourism scheme says that you can come here for business engagement (not working, you need a permit for that), for visiting relatives, other things than just tourism
September-December 2024:
- -Revisiting Non-OA and Non-OX visa requirements
- -Streamlining non-immigrant visa types
- -Expanding e-Visa services to all Thai RTE/RTCG (you will be able to apply online for a Thai visa without going to the embassy)
June 2025
- Electronic Travel Authority
- This should be done 1 day or more before the arrival date. It’s for foreigners who are entitled to enter Thailand without a visa, so that the government and embassy can get some essential info on these travelers (such as their flights and hotels) that it doesn’t get with the current visa exemption scheme.
- It will take around 10 minutes to do this
Lecture from Professor Daniel Schlagwein – Key Points
- One of the first people to study digital nomadism
- Humans used to be nomads, but agriculture led to our having to stay in one place (seeds need time to grow).
- The ‘workplace’ began with the invention of the steam engine. Nowadays, the ‘steam engine’ is in your laptop, and most of us don’t work in agriculture anymore, so most of the reasons for why we stopped being nomads are no longer relevant–so in this way, we are actually going back to square one.
- Difficult to measure how many digital nomads there are because we are flying under the radar using tourist visas, but World Economic Forum estimates 63 million, while Schlagwein estimates 50 million.
- Schlagwein co-authored a paper on digital nomadism in Chiang Mai that was published recently
- Future of digital nomadism: co-everything. Co-villages, etc. This is becoming a replacement for a family – many digital nomads don’t have kids. Normally, the family is the organizing unit of community and social lives, but in this case other community/social groupings are replacing that function in some contexts. Co-[x] – or co-anything–plays a role in replacing that.
- Digital nomadism = post-nation state phenomenon; it does not in a meaningful sense take place in a local reference framework, but rather, in an international, digital, globalized framework. Not replacing the nation state, but emerging as a space on top of and aside from typical nation states.
- How do digital nomads impact local communities? Schlagwein and colleagues did case studies on Chiang Mai, Canggu, Lisbon, MEdellin, and Australia to compare impacts on and reactions from local communities worldwide. Research is always conducted with local co-authors in order to understand the local context.
- The case study on Chiang Mai showed that overall the reactions and impact were very positive; digital nomads are good for and welcomed in Chiang Mai.
- Event “X”: There’s a high risk of geopolitical change and chaos in the current environment. Gaza/Israel, Russia/Ukraine, Taiwan/China…no one knows what’s going to happen, and geopolitical factors can put digital nomad lifestyles at risk.
- Whether impact was good or bad depended somewhat on size of the city. A big city can absorb more foreigners without having a big impact. In smaller places like Canngu, digital nomads showing pu has a much bigger impact, so it depends much more on whether the local community likes it. In Canngu the narrative was split negative/positive. In Medelin, things were in the “the gringos are coming” context, taking advantage of lower prices, and in Lisbon there was a big narrative about gentrification and landlords putting places on AirBnB and asking long-term tenants to move out. Gentrification causes both social hardship and economic development. Sometimes concerns in terms of progressive vs conservative values. In Ausrtalia the asian/western dynamic was flipped–koreans and japanese coming to Australia, and Australia actively wants to attract them.
- Thais look at these matters in very pragmatic way–they acknowledge that they have many different types of tourists and think about which types of tourists they want to encourage. Digital nomads don’t crowd the streets so don’t have a big impact in that way, not booking their tours through overseas companies, but spending locally, and working during the week and going out on the weekends, like Thais. However, this was not the same lens many other localities worldwide adopted–it varied enormously location-to-location, because reactions to digital nomads take place in a very localized context, which is different from place to place.
Session by John Ho of Alt_Chiang Mai and Alt_Ping River – A Community-First Approach to Entrepreneurship
- Crowd-funded 650k to build Alt_Ping River coliving and coworking space
- Typical approach to business tends to be self-first; ‘community first’ approach stands in opposition to this.
- Benefits of community first approach:
- Easier to figure out market-oridct fit with direct community input
- You save on marketing costs due to word of mouth
- You don’t need ot be an expert in everything
- Customer loyalty becomes natural
- You don’t need VC/Angels
- Lessons from earlier entrepreneurship journeys (Martial Tribes, Periscope, Married to Chiang Mai)
- Money can buy members, but not engagement
- Authenticity is key–be genuine.
- Collaboration and cross-pollination expand community
- Crowdfunding works!
- Quality of audience is so much more important than quantity – only had 5,000 followers for married to CM, could make friends with them and monetize some of what he was pitching them
- Online community building can lead to offline community building – Married to CM platform convinced many people to move to Chiang Mai
- Don’t try to please everyone
- John didn’t know how to do anything related to coliving or coworking–comes from a hospitality background, so knew how to operate.
- Signed contract right at the beginning of COVID so couldn’t ask other coworking/coliving business owners for advice;, asked digital nomads in CM and around the world what they thought of his design concepts + what they wanted – got very useful feedback! Had to make some design changes based on feedback, which caused some hiccups but ultimately resulted in a much better-designed space–with the community to credit for their feedback in making that happen.
- What does it mean to support the community in being community-focused? They do lots of events for community at Alt. Ice bath, yoga, family meeting in which they can come up with activities they want to do in CM together, Friday pizza nights, etc.
- There’s a board that shows who’s who–who’s staying there, what do they do. Creates an automatic, fast sense of belonging.
- If you want to create a community, give people free food.
- Active listening – very important. If people want to talk to him, he finds ways to do it. Learning through that process how to be a more engaged owner, by listening to their opinions, getting feedback, improving. This takes lots of patience, but is very important if you want to build a solid community.
- Found an investor who said he wants to have Alt_ all over Thailand. Found a great new location. But that all turned out to be too good to be true–the deal didn’t go through. John was super bummed out; talked to some residents of Alt_ about it, and one of them asked if he’d considered crowdfunding. So they partnered up, the resident gave him some ideas, and he gave his first pitch to a group of a few people–and two Alt residents became investors!
- From there, the word spread. People liked the idea of Alt_, they wanted to pitch in, and so in 6 months they crowdfunded $650,000 through the community – through family and friends.
- Downsides of the community first approach:
- You have to be a people person. And people are messy.
- Building a community takes time. You can’t scale quickly.
- You don’t get to decide on everything.
- There are no secrets – you need to be open and transparent about the bad things, as well as the good things. If they don’t know, they can’t help you. Business owners are sometimes very protective of their intellectual property or busines strategies–community approach is counter to that.
