cola6

Hello,

I'll be traveling to Thailand next month on Qatar Airways, but I just checked their site now and it states that to enter Thailand you have to be fully vaccinated. This isn't true and the requirement for full vaccination was officially scraped by the Thai health authorities on January 9th.

Qatar Airway's site says their information was updated on January 17th, so I spoke to them via online chat and their solution was to take a printed news article to my departure airport and show it at check-in to the desk operator.

I feel like this is somewhat unprofessional and I'm a bit worried it leaves the door open to issues at check-in. Is there any reason why Qatar Airways has outdated information? Thailand is one of the major tourist destinations of the world, so surely they would want to keep this up to date in their systems? Is there perhaps some way to notify them to make the necessary correction?

Thank you

plunet

To be a little fair to Qatar, Thailand did briefly require non-Thai nationals to be vaccinated earlier this month but then changed their mind a few days later. The inconsistency from the Thai government doesn't help.

The good news is that whatever is on the Qatar airways website is not what the check-in agents use to determine whether you are admissable to your destination, they use a system called TIMATIC that is run by IATA and usually updated within a few hours of a change being announced by a relevant authority.

You can use a user friendly interface to check timatic via the SkyTeam website. https://www.skyteam.com/en/flights-a...isa-and-health
there are others that will let you see the official text

cola6

Thank you for the fast reply and giving that information. It definitely put my mind at rest a bit.

And yes you're absolutely correct... Thailand flip-flopped within a space of 48 hours and confused a lot of people. Definitely not Qatar Airways fault in that regard. My only concern was the "Last Updated on Jan 17, 2023" on their website, but I guess like you say the TIMATIC system supersedes that

Thanks again

Traveller999

I did fly from Europe to BKK last week, nobody asked about vaccination or anything else "abnormal" - so I would not worry about too much :-)

brunos

COuntries keep changing their entry requirements.Furthermoe, they differentiate between origins and nationalities (e.g. for Chinese in many countries). An airline is not able to update their website in a timely fashion. You MUST look at the official website of that country. Even TIMATIC has problems getting updated.
The only fairly safe info is for entry into the airline hub, e.g. Hong Kong for CX or Qatar for QR, and even then there could be a lag. Thailand is famous for zigzagging, announcing a new measure for the next day and then removing it or amending it without notice. Even different official Thai sources could give different information.
Not QR fault.
.

mr_botak

Good grief have we not all given up on this yet?

plunet

You might hope so, but as is always the case the onus is on the traveller to ensure that they comply with the rules of the country they intend to enter, and it was a valid question to query the wrong info on the Qatar website. I am sure it won't be the last time we see this query on this or other FT fora.