Getting our Thailand Tourist Visa Extended via a ‘border run’ - How did we do it?
Before we arrived in Thailand, we had planned to use the maximum number of allowable days to stay as tourists. That was 45 days on entry (free) and then extending it at a Thai Immigration office for a further 30 days (1,900 baht each or £44.00).
Our travel plans had us moving onto Laos and Vietnam after. During our first month in Phuket, we realised how much we liked Thailand and that affection grew even more when we were in Chiang Mai after. After a week in Chiang Mai, that’s when we decided to stick around longer but I had no idea if we were allowed to stay beyond the maximum tourist visa period and if we could do it, how should we do it?
Are we allowed to stay beyond our tourist visa period (45 + 30 days)?
In our case, it was 45 days on entry (normally 30 days) which Thailand had temporarily increased to boost tourism for this high season. We extended our visa at Chiang Mai immigration office. After the 30 day extension, in theory, your time is up as a tourist and you should be leaving the country. If you don’t, it’s illegal and you will face fines for overstaying or even worse, deported and banned from ever visiting again. No one knows better than us about being fined for overstaying! The Indonesian overstay fines we had to pay back in October last year were still fresh in our minds!
In short, the answer is yes. Yes you can stay longer as a tourist beyond the initial period and to do this, you need to leave the country and re-enter obtaining a new visa on entry stamp. Thailand does not have any official rules against this and as such, thousands of ‘farangs’ (foreigners) are leaving and re-entering the Kingdom of Thailand on a daily basis by land or air using any of the neighbouring countries. These countries include Laos, Cambodia and Malaysia. Myanmar is not on this list as their borders are currently closed due to the ongoing political instability. The foreigners doing this include families, couples, long term expats, backpackers. Almost anyone who is a tourist and wants to extend their stay. There are many other long term Thai visa options (including education and work visas) which you can obtain but this blog is not about those.
How did The Arshads do their border run?
We were in Chiang Mai at the time which was close to an international airport. We could have booked return flights into any number of countries to get our passports stamped with new visas. We decided not to fly because the cost for all 6 of us would not be as cheap as a land crossing. Plus we wanted to explore Chiang Rai via road and drive to Pai after, so overland crossing at the Laos border was looking to be the most convenient and cheapest option.
There are loads of agents/tour companies that can help you with border runs. For a set fee, they can take the headache away from you organising everything from start to finish. It literally can be done all in the same day via shared or private minibus. We opted to shave some of that middleman cost away and drive our own rental car to the border and back. It was convenient anyway as we wanted to slowly drive through Chiang Rai over a few weeks and take our time discovering this part of Northern Thailand including a trip to the Golden Triangle where the Thai, Laos and Myanmar borders all meet together.
Our Thai Laos border run in 5 easy steps
After lots of research and planning our driving route, we chose our border crossing point. I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you we were nervous. Despite hearing lots of happy tourists tell us how smooth things went for them, we also heard some bad stories where they couldn’t re-enter the country for whatever reason. We were hoping our story didn’t turn out to be a bad one!
1st step: Drive to Thai - Laos Friendship Bridge Number four in Chiang Khong. Park car at Thai border point. Go through Thai immigration and receive passport stamps as you depart the country. That went smoothly for us. No overstay this time!
2nd step: Walk to the bridge where a shuttle bus picks up and takes you across. We paid 20 baht (about 50p) each. The journey is only 5 mins across the Mekong river.
3rd step: Step off the bus. Now you are on Laos soil. Enter into Laos via their immigration border checkpoint. Someone in their office very kindly offered to help us (for a small fee) with filling out forms and getting our passports stamped with Laos visa on entry ink. Cost was about £35 each.
4th step: Laos immigration stamps obtained. Passports given back to us. Jump back onto the bus (another 20 baht each) and across the mighty Mekong river again!
5th step: Guess …? Yep you got it. We go through the Thai Immigration border crossing. Get our visa on entry stamps (free!). Walk back to our car and off we go back into Thailand with our fresh visa stamps.
One thing to note is that Thailand Immigration is slowly becoming more vigilant when it comes to multiple departure and re-entry border runs. They are implementing border run caps and putting more monitoring in place so it may not be as easy to do these kind of things in the future. Please check the rules and do your research before you plan a border run.
So for us the story is a happy one. It went smoothly. We literally spent 30 mins on Laos soil before leaving again. It feels like a waste of money spending £35 each on Laos visas and not even properly entering this beautiful country but that’s just part of the costs of doing a border run to Laos. If we had crossed into Malaysia, we wouldn’t have had a cost to go in and out (Brits get free visa on entry) but given we were in Northern Thailand, we were nowhere near Malaysia and didn’t want to get on a plane. We had plans to keep driving and explore more of Thailand after the Laos border run and boy was it worth it! Pai and Krabi were next on the list.
If you are thinking about doing something similar but aren’t sure how to approach it, hopefully this blog will have helped you. If not, please reach out to us. Our details are on the Contact Us page of our website.
