Thailand forum

Hello boys and girls,

This question does come up often, and as far as I've personally experienced and read from multiple posts on this website, none of us has even seen someone turned away at immigration because they don't have proof of onward travel. The best I can tell is that Thai immigration reserves the right to turn you away and uses this as an excuse if you look too rough around the edges. But even that hardly ever happens.

The bigger risk, as the OP mentioned, is that your airline will not let you board if you don't have proof of onward travel. Even there though, it doesn't happen often. The first thing you can do is check with your airline and see what their policy is. Try and get something in writing if you can just in case the particular gate agent is having a bad hair day when you check in for your flight.

If it looks risky with your airline, a couple of quick workarounds to this problem are to A) apply for a 60-day tourist visa before you travel instead of relying on the 30-day visa exemption on arrival or book onward travel with a cheap airline like Air Asia and then cancel if you don't need the flight.

I'm sure others will have feedback and suggestions too. Cheers.

Thanks @exacto, much appreciated!

useless to contact them- use brains: would an airline ever telly ou they will flout official rules? What exacto was not exact in to tell: the apllication of the as such clear rules also vary per airline and per airport. Notoriously OZieland down yondah is often quoted for being very stringent in enforcing them.

Just to add that I'm in the immigration line something like 5 or 6 times a year and I've never seen anybody asked for proof of onward travel. I've traveled from UK with pretty much all the Middle Eastern airlines and they've never asked me.So the odds are certainly in your favor but s**t happens as they say.