Immigration increases passenger handling capacity at Suvarnabhumi airport

[Gaybutton]

Immigration increases passenger handling capacity at Suvarnabhumi airport

By Wassayos Ngamkham

November 2, 2022

Arriving travellers queue at immigration booths at Suvarnabhumi airport on Sunday.

The Immigration Bureau on Wednesday increased its capacity to handle passenger arrivals at Suvarnabhumi airport after complaints about lengthy delays on Sunday.

Pol Maj Gen Choengron Rimphadee, the bureau spokesman, said arrivals' queues peaked on Sundays between 1pm and 5pm, with 3,000-4,000 passenghers landing per hour at Suvarnabhumi airport.

On that day immigration increased staffing and average waiting time was about an hour, he said.

Immigration officrs took about 45 seconds to check each arrival, using a blacklist and collecting biometrics, the spokesman said.

"Immigration police must watch out for foreigners who may arrive in the guise of a tourist for criminal purposes, especially call scams or maybe to cause a disturbance during the coming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit," Pol Maj Gen Choengron said.

To cope with the increasing traffic, Airports of Thailand had increased the number of immigration booths from 92 to 119 and more immigration officers were on duty from Wednesday on. This would allow them to handle about 6,500 arrivals per hour without compromising security, he said.

Earlier the capacity was about 5,500 travellers an hour.

In addition, AOT staff would manage the queues and advise travellers on readying their documents beforehand for quick inspection, Pol Maj Gen Choengron said.

He said 45,000-50,000 foreigners were now arriving in the country daily by air and land.

https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/ge ... mi-airport

[gerefan]

“ Immigration officrs took about 45 seconds to check each arrival, using a blacklist and collecting biometrics, the spokesman said.”

I wish.....

Reminder: Over 70’s are entitled to go through Fast Track (inbound and outbound) regardless of whether they are travelling Business or Economy.
Keep to the far right as you approach Immigration on arrival. There are very few signs!

[Gaybutton]

Reminder: Over 70’s are entitled to go through Fast Track

Thank you gerefan. Your post just helped a lot of people who either did not know that over 70's can be Fast Tracked and/or did not know where to find it.

[Jun]

Whilst I'm sure it can happen, I've never yet had an unreasonable wait at Suvarnabhumi immigration.
The first thing I do is rush from the plane to immigration as fast as I can, as the queue can swell up due to arrivals from my own plane and other large planes arriving at almost the same time. Bear in mind that according to the old schedule, EVA and Thai had large planes arriving from LHR within a few minutes of each other & I have seen an A380 unloading at the same time. So the length of the queue can more than double from the time when I first got there.
Of course, as with many administrative processes in Thailand, immigration is much slower than it could be. The last time I went to Malaysia, it took what seemed like 30 seconds and that included fingerprints and stamping my passport, just like in Thailand.

I am almost always through immigration before my checked bag is ready.

There's no real reason why they couldn't allow more people to use electronic immigration gates. Citizens of 38 countries can use them in the UK. These obviously include the camera & some countries have them with fingerprint scanning. The only remaining challenge is the passport stamp, however in 2022, there are plenty of alternative technologies which could be applied.