Erin and Kattie discuss what visa runs are, and why Thailand is cracking down on this travel "hack" to extend visa eligibility.

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Written and Hosted by Erin Hynes

Produced by Kattie Laur

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What are you talking about?

Hey, Katie.

Hey there, aaron.

So it's April 1st.

Oh, I should have April Fools.

Do you.

What am I doing?

I was just thinking about this.

Literally, I woke up and I was like, ooh, it's April Fools.

What am I gonna do?

And then I was like, nothing.

I have nothing.

I know.

Like, I always remember that.

And then it's.

It feels like it's too late to come up with anything.

So you are headed to Japan soon this month?

I can't handle it.

I honestly can't handle it.

What are you most excited for?

I honest, I think more than anything, I'm excited to just, like, be somewhere else.

That's fair.

I am.

I'm definitely kind of pooped right now in just regular, everyday life, and I'm just ready for a change of pace.

And I'm so excited about food.

I can't handle how much food I'm excited for.

And also, we are getting tattoos when we go there, and our artist just sent us our tattoo designs, and it looks so good, so I'm so excited to get that done.

When in the trip are you getting your tattoo?

It's gonna be at the very end, so after we've enjoyed all of our onsens and stuff, then we're gonna get it about two days before we leave.

Nice.

Good call.

I will be heading to Vancouver for a travel conference, which I'm really excited for.

I'm just, like, manifesting that it's nice weather, because every time I've been in Vancouver, it just pours rain, so hopefully not this time.

We'll see.

It will be the spring, so I would, like, expect the worst and just be happy with whatever comes.

Yeah, you have to when you're in Vancouver.

You know what they say.

April showers bring May flowers.

And I wonder what the Vancouver version of that is.

Well, Vancouver does get a lot of cherry blossoms, but I'm worried that I'm missing the window for the cherry blossoms, which is too bad because they are known for this.

Like, that city has so many cherry blossom trees.

We'll see.

Maybe I'll get lucky and see a few of them.

I just don't want my hikes to get rained out.

Last time I wanted to hike and I could not because it was just, like, too rainy, so.

So hopefully not this time.

We'll see.

Okay, so have you ever heard about a Visa run?

Do you know what a Visa run is?

No.

I'VE never heard of this.

Okay.

So a visa run is when you leave a country that you're staying in, usually for a short time so that you can come back and reset your visa.

So for example, when you go to Japan, you'll be given a 30 day visa, visa on arrival, because you're Canadian.

So they stamp your passport.

You're good for 30 days.

At the end of the 30 days, you legally have to leave.

If you wanted to stay longer in Japan, if you were like staying there, kind of building a life, really vibing with Japan, you're like, I want to stay longer.

You would, on day 29ish, leave, take a flight to somewhere close, probably maybe South Korea, maybe Vietnam.

You'd spend two or three days and then you'd fly back to Japan and get a new stamp.

Oh.

So the 30 days resets.

It resets now.

Interesting.

This is what we're going to talk about.

Some countries are set up to catch this.

Japan, I haven't looked like specifically, but I expect that they would catch this.

They would be like, you just left, you can't come back in.

So for example, like in the eu they have what's called the Schengen Zone, which is like a collection of countries that your visa on arrival captures.

Like, you're good to enter all these countries and you're good for 90 days.

But to reset it, you have to have left for I think 30 days.

It could be longer, I'd have to double check.

But I know there's a rule about this.

You couldn't just leave for 24 hours and then come back and have it reset.

You have to leave for a substantial amount of time for it to reset.

And, and there's a maximum amount of time you can spend in a year.

So border control does look at this.

So basically what this does is makes it difficult to sort of like sneakily live there.

So.

Yeah.

So most countries only let you stay a certain number of days if you're there on a tourist visa.

In my experience, it's usually 30, 60 or 90 days.

And yeah, visa runs are just a method to get around this.

And usually people are using this method to get around it because a proper visa costs a lot of money or is a difficult process.

Yeah, yeah.

Have you ever overrun a visa?

I have, yeah.

Okay.

I was like, I don't know if you would be too panicked about doing that or if you just maybe have done it by accident.

I.

Well, it was by accident.

When and where?

Tell me.

I was, I was very young.

I was young and silly.

And I didn't understand how visas worked at this time.

I truly was just like young and ignorant.

So I was 23 and I was backpacking around Europe.

And this is what made it complicated.

I had been in Europe on a specific visa, student visa, studying.

And then I went backpacking for several months and this complicated my visa situation.

And so I eventually realized I had overstayed by not long, like a couple days.

But when I realized it was because this is going to be so long winded.

But this was the year that Croatia joined the Schengen Zone or joined the eu and so I was going to Croatia.

And when I went to Croatia, I crossed via the train.

So border control came on the train, they looked at my passport and they said, you've overstayed, like you shouldn't be in Europe right now.

But we're going to let this fly because we just joined.

So like, we're not, we're not sticklers yet.

So they let it fly.

I freaked out.

I was in Croatia, like, oh my gosh, what am I going to do?

I should probably fly home, like right now.

I think I was meant to leave in like two weeks.

So I was debating like, do I stay?

Do I just fly right now?

And I literally went to the Canadian embassy and they were like, we can't help you with this.

This is like your problem.

Oh my God.

Well, they're right.

It is my problem.

Like, what are they going to do?

And then I talked to like various backpackers and they were like, it's fine, just like risk it.

They probably won't notice.

So I flew out of Paris, back home.

That's where my flight was scheduled out of.

And I will never forget the sheer fear I felt exiting that airport.

Like going through border control to catch my flight because I was like, I might get blacklisted because I've overstayed by like 12 days.

In the UK.

You're never allowed in Europe ever again.

Yeah, that's what I was afraid of.

Luckily it didn't happen.

And I do listen, like, it's probably because I don't look.

I did not get racially profiled or like profiled in any degree.

Like I was like a 23 year old blonde woman.

So I think there was probably a lot of privilege wrapped up in how that went for me.

But it was a good lesson because it did really scare me.

And I'm extremely cautious about, about visas now.

Like, I would never overstay one now because I always know what's going on in the visa situation.

Like, I.

When I think about it, I truly at that stage, didn't understand, Like, I don't think I even understood that I had a visa being.

I don't think I truly understood even what a visa was up until, like, six years ago.

Basically, up until, like, you and I started this podcast.

Well.

And we talk about this in our Travel is Political episode.

It's because it's such.

If you have a privileged passport, it is such an unseen process because a lot of the time you're just showing up and being stamped in.

There's no discussion about the visa.

And so so many of us are set up to be ignorant about it because it's just, like, not information that we ever really have to contend with.

And you don't even know what, like, a visa even looks like or like.

I remember when I went to the UK last year and you had to pay 10 bucks for your visa or something like that.

I think that was the first time I'd ever, like, physically been conscious of a visa.

Filling out a visa form and paying for something and then being like, am I doing this right?

Like, what?

Yeah, yeah.

Especially if you're traveling to countries where, like, you have visa on arrival, you definitely.

It's definitely easy not to notice it.

I remember, like, the first time I got, like, a full physical visa put into my passport, I was blown away.

I'd never seen one before.

It was in Southeast Asia.

Like, I had to do a whole application, had to talk with them when I arrived.

And, like, they really.

They literally glue into your passport like, a document.

Oh, yeah.

I don't know if they do it anymore now that we're switching to these, like, e visas.

So to go back to Southeast Asia.

That's actually when I first started hearing about visa runs because they were very common in Thailand.

The classic scenario was a person who had been backpacking, landed in Thailand, decided to work in a hostel.

They were digital nomading, and they had maxed out their time, so they were looking to continue basically living in Thailand, but their visa had run out, so they would go on a visa run.

And I remember meeting people in countries around Southeast Asia who were on their visa runs.

This is how I first heard about it.

So they had usually left.

It was usually Thailand.

They had left for a couple days and were only away so that they could re enter and get a new tourist visa.

And they only needed to leave for, like, a couple of days.

Nothing significant.

Oh, sometimes they only need to Leave for a couple of hours, like, one night.

Wow.

So visa runs from Thailand.

We're so, so prevalent that I learned that there are agencies that facilitate them that will literally transport you to the closest location, usually in Laos.

So, for example, you'd spend, like, one night in Laos, and then this agency would bring you back, like, on a bus.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

Wait, that can't be legal, right?

That's like an underground travel industry.

Well, here's the thing, and we'll talk about this.

But, like, it technically was legal because of the way their visa system was set up.

Yeah.

It's a gray area for sure.

Yeah.

Like, you could call it fraud, but it's not.

Because, like, what I was saying is you couldn't do this with the eu.

Like, they would catch it, so it would technically be illegal.

Yeah.

So this.

This concept was, like, very normalized.

I talked to so many people who were doing this.

It felt like literally just a normal of the backpacking circuit.

And no one questioned it.

It was just like, oh, yeah, you hit your 30, 60, or 90 days, so you're going on a visa run so that you can stay.

But the more that I've thought about it over the years, as with many things, the more I've realized that visa runs are a little problematic.

Yeah.

Because what is happening essentially is people are living in a country long term, but without going through the actual immigration pathways that are meant for.

So they're not getting the proper visa, they're not necessarily contributing in the ways that residents are expected to, and they're kind of staying in this gray area where they benefit from living there without fully being accountable to the system.

And this has ripple effects.

It can impact housing, the economy, even labor markets, especially when people are working remotely or informally while on a tourist visa.

Another layer of this that you really can't ignore is that visa runs are a privilege.

Not everyone can just hop on a bus, cross a border, and reset their stay.

It's something that tends to be accessible to people with specific passports, financial flexibility and mobility.

So this was.

Thailand is, like, known to be a place where you could do multiple visa runs pretty easily.

Like, I met people that were on, like, their third or fourth visa run.

Oh, my God.

Like, had fully been living in Thailand for, like, a year or two, just visa running.

But immigration authorities started noticing patterns of People doing these back to back entries.

So they realized like, oh, people are just living here long term on tourist visas.

So visa runs are going to be looked at a lot more closely now.

And if you do it multiple times, especially more than twice, and they've said without a clear reason, there's a chance that you could be denied entry.

When did this crackdown officially begin?

Oh, interesting.

Because I can't.

My brain is immediately going white lotus.

Influence of white lotus over tourism.

You know, it could have to do with that.

Like, that did occur to me that like Thailand has been like grappling with over tourism.

So maybe they're pulling this as a lever to try to like reduce the amount of people coming.

But I was thinking about this like as a lever of over tourism.

And I was also thinking about it in the context of COVID I think during the pandemic years they probably didn't want to crack down on this because they wanted people there.

Like, Thailand saw a really devastating drop in tourism that really impacted communities that rely on tourism.

So it's interesting because it is a lever in a way to encourage people to stay as well.

But then in that case it's like, why not just extend your tourist visa?

Give people a year long tourist visa.

Yeah, that's true, that's true.

Instead of having people do these visa runs, like when I was backpacking in Southeast Asia, digital nomads, they existed, but they were not like around like they are now since the pandemic.

And I do know that it's a lot of the digital nomad like community that does a lot of this visa running.

Because often digital nomads don't get a work visa, they're just there on a tourist visa.

Yeah, they're nomads by nature.

Like they're meant to be bopping around and stuff like that.

So I think no one would think otherwise if they're just like leaving and coming back, at least in their community.

Yeah, people that know them wouldn't be surprised.

Yeah.

So yeah, I would say I'm actually, I think it's probably a good thing that Thailand is addressing visa runs.

I think it's important to like put more boundaries around stuff like this and kind of reflects a bigger shift as well.

I do think that countries are trying to have more control over who is staying long term and under what conditions.

And I really do think like the wave of digital nomadism that started like during the pandemic is potentially impacting this because you've seen quite a few countries like shift their approach to visas.

Like many of them have digital nomad visas now that you can apply for specifically that are generally a longer stay and also acknowledge that you'll be working.

So yeah, something that used to feel like a casual travel hack is now being taken a lot more seriously.

Yeah.

Now that you're putting it out there, Erin,.

I just, and you know, you know why I brought this up too?

Because of course, like, I saw people on Reddit complaining about it like, oh, now I can't do my visa runs to stay in Thailand for the whole year.

And that like triggered me.

I was like, okay, now I have to talk about this.