90 Day check in at Chonburi Pattaya Immigration

Thailand has a 90 day check in rule for all foreigners residing in the kingdom. Is Chonburi Pattaya immigration really ready to handle the growing foreigner population?

The new immigration office has now been open in Jomtien Beach for a few years now, having moved from its old location Pattaya Beach Rd soi 8.

This new building and location was set up to be a bigger and more efficient office. In reality it is about a 100 square meter building with very limited parking and limited capacity to properly handle the various departments needed to handle the many different immigration issues concerning foreigners.  I'm not quite sure how such a small building will be able to cope in the future with a few looming challenges...

1. The growing number of tourists coming for longer periods of time and therefore needing visa extensions.
2. The growing number of retirees moving here and now needing to check in every 90 days
3. With the growing industry here in Pattaya Jomtien areas there are far more foreign workers also needing to re issue visas and do their required check ins.  

 I showed up today for my check in at 1:00PM, i had a few errands to run in the morning so i could not be there when the doors opened. The place was so over crowded it took a few minutes just to be able to enter. It was another 10 minutes of waiting in line just to get the proper form to fill out and another few minutes just to be able to hand it back in. Once i was assigned a number, i saw there were about 12 people ahead of me in the queue. I thought for sure i would be there all afternoon, i was totally surprised to see that i was done and out the door in 15 minutes!

The 90 day check in is free. All you need is a copy of your passport, visa, and tm arrival card. No photos, bank statements, etc. All the immigration officer does is look at the form, hit it with a half dozen stamps, tear off the bottom and staple it in your passport. 

With the ability to check in for a flight on line, download and file your taxes on line i find it hard to believe there can not be a similar process for foreigners to check in. I was number 397 today. Just for that department. Now i am not sure if i was the 397th person to do a 90 day check in here in the Pattaya Jomtien office but by the looks of things there was sure to have been more than 100. What if the local immigration offices could reduce the number of people they needed to serve and increase the space available for other more complicated matters, would that be a possible solution to an obviously growing problem?