BANGKOK — The Immigration Bureau on Tuesday said they are ready to handle a large influx of visitors during the Chinese New Year holidays.
Up to 150,000 visitors are expected to arrive at Suvarnabhumi Airport each day to celebrate the Year of the Dragon, according to a forecast by the bureau. Pol. Maj. Gen. Choengron Rimphadee, commander of Immigration Division 2, which oversees airport border controls, said his unit has implemented several measures to handle the increased flow of passengers at Bangkok’s main international airport.
Sixty additional immigration officers were mobilized from other units to man the counters and the existing officers were instructed not to take leave, Choengron said.
Technicians would also be on standby for an event of system failure, which happened last month when the biometric system that validates passenger’s identification and the automatic gates at Suvarnabhumi Airport failed for more than nine hours, causing chaos for travelers as long queues built up at the border control.
The glitch meant passengers had to have their passport checked manually rather than by computers, which took up to more than one minute per person for the process that normally took 45 seconds.
The event prompted PM Srettha Thavisin to make an unannounced visit to the airport on Monday, where he told officials that passengers should not take more than 30 minutes to go through the immigration. He also instructed the bureau to improve its IT systems and recruit more officers to speed up the process.
“I want to provide convenience to visitors since they get off the plane,” Srettha said. “They should have the opportunity to spend their time sightseeing and spending money instead of wasting their time at the airport.”
Long lines at Bangkok’s airports are common, evidenced by photos of overflowing arrival halls and accounts of passengers waiting for hours to have their passport stamped.
In December, a video showing travelers queuing up in droves at Suvarnabhumi Airport’s arrival hall went viral, which the Immigration Bureau later said that it was due to the unusual flow of passengers which happened to arrive at the same time, compounded with flight delay issues on that day.
