I’m currently working out of Cambodia as Covid numbers are very low here, and it’s the one country in Asia where life is close to ‘normal’. There’s a nationwide mask mandate in force in Cambodia, but here on the island of Koh Rong where I’m currently staying, nobody is wearing facemasks. 

I was planning to spend two months in Cambodia and then move on to Thailand. I had already booked a flight to Phuket for 17 March when I was in Dubai last month in case I was asked to produce an onward ticket on arrival in Phnom Penh. That turned out to be unnecessary because they were more interested in my vaccination and PCR test certificates at the airport than they were in where I was going after Cambodia.

Yesterday a fellow traveller at the resort where I am staying asked me whether I had applied for my Thailand Pass yet. I told him I hadn’t but was planning to do so next week. He advised me to do it straightaway because there was such a big backlog of applications, it was taking up to 60 days to approve the passes, and some travellers were not even receiving their passes within that timeframe.

So, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to board my flight to Thailand without a Thailand Pass, I got on the web last night to do my registration. But it was not an easy task. After completing all the registration details, including my flight details, I was taken to a page where I had to upload the vaccination certificates for my first two vaccinations. A requirement was that the certificates include my passport number, but my Australian vaccination certificates for my first two shots didn’t include that, so I uploaded my international vaccination certificate instead which did show my passport number as well as the details of my first two vaccinations.

The Thailand Pass registration page wouldn’t accept PDFs so I had to first convert them to PNG images. Then it asked for the QR code to be uploaded separately with a warning that if that wasn’t done, the processing of the application would take longer. So I cropped the QR code from my international vaccination certificate, converted that to a PNG and uploaded that. But that produced a message saying “invalid QR code”.

That may have been because my international vaccination certificate contained details of all three of my vaccinations, so I tried cropping and uploading the QR codes from my individual Australian vaccination certificates. Those were also rejected, possibly because they would not have contained my passport number. I tried converting to JPEGs as well. I was able to upload those instead, but they also produced the same “invalid” messages.

But I was able to move on to the next page which asked for the receipts for pre-booked accommodation and PCR tests. It was there that I realised that in order to obtain a Thailand Pass you needed to have already paid for accommodation and PCR tests in advance. There was no indication as to whether those would be refunded if the Thailand Pass did not arrive in time.

There was a link to a list of hotels and resorts which had been approved for the Day 1 and Day 5 stays, but there were over 200 pages to the list and the hotels seemed to be in no particular order. They were approved accommodation options for all over Thailand. I scrolled through a few pages until I found a reasonable looking place in Phuket, but when I clicked on the “more details” link, it only showed further information about the hotel. There was no booking link.

So, were we supposed to choose a hotel from the approved list on the Thailand Pass website and then go to an ordinary hotel booking site to make the booking? I tried that, but for the hotel I selected the normal booking sites did not offer option to book the package including PCR tests which was required to obtain the Thailand Pass.

At that stage I started to lose patience because if it was going to take 60 days to approve the pass, there was a strong likelihood that it wouldn’t come through by 17 March and I would be making last minute changes to my flight as well as possibly losing the money that I would be required to pay for hotels and PCR tests in Thailand.

I did a little research online to see if other travellers were experiencing the same hassles, and the answer was a resounding yes. A commentary on Channel News Asia as far back as November described the process as “painful, unsmooth and un-user friendly”. It quoted an online travel forum user who described the Thailand Pass registration system as “an epic failure in system design”.

And there were hundreds of reports of applicants not being able to complete their applications because of technical glitches in the system, and others having their applications rejected with no reason being given and no contact details provided to find out why.

I could have spent more time investigating how to do the hotel bookings and trying to find ones that offered refunds if the pass didn’t arrive in time, but I wondered whether it was worth the hassle given that the Philippines and Bali are now opening up, and both countries are reporting far fewer Covid cases than Thailand.  

I also couldn’t access the page where I was required to upload my health insurance details without first completing the hotel and PCR test bookings, so there might have been some problems there too because my Bupa international health insurance certificate doesn’t have a signature or QR code (Bupa told me to advise the Thai health authorities to call their London office if they want verification of my health insurance coverage . . . yeah, sure!).

Laos and Vietnam are also opening up too – at this stage only to group tours and package tours to designated destinations – but that might change soon for independent travellers. 

And of course, there is the possibility that if travellers start heading to the Philippines and Bali because getting a Thailand pass is too much hassle, Thailand might relax their rules and let people in on a “test and go” basis as Cambodia and the Philippines are doing or allow “sandbox” arrivals without prior registration (as Bali is proposing to do). Thailand’s economy is heavily dependent on tourism, and I doubt they would want to see large numbers of travellers cancelling trips there in favour of other Southeast Asian destinations.

In the end I decided not to proceed with my Thailand pass. A lot can happen in the next five weeks. I will leave my flight booking in place for the time being and see what other options might appear before my two-month Cambodia visa runs out. If Thailand drops the Thailand Pass requirement I may still head there on 17 March, otherwise it looks like I’ll be heading to Bali.

The Philippines is oppressively hot between mid-March and mid-May, so I may wait until the rainy season starts to head there. Bali is a much better option during those months.