Banged up in Bangkok airport

October 27, 2011

I feel sorry for all the people who work hard to project a positive image of Thailand abroad, and for the conscientious people working in Bangkok airport, both of whom must feel very unhappy with the way some in the airport continue to mishandle problems which could be resolved in a different, more user-friendly way.

I am back in the UK for a quick visit, and in the first newspaper I read (the Daily Mail – no, my sister buys it) is a feature on an outraged British citizen, Francesca Salt, and her recent treatment at Bangkok airport, when it was discovered a page in her passport was missing when she presented herself at immigration on arrival.

It doesn't say what was on the page, but whatever it was, she should either have been refused entry, if it was something important for Thailand's immigration procedures, or let through if it was irrelevant.

Instead she spent thirty hours banged up in Bangkok airport, before being released to fly back to the UK.

She had been teaching in Thailand for six months and thinks the page was lost as she carried the passport around everywhere with her in the country.

She then flew for a short holiday to Indonesia (whose immigration officials hadn’t made a problem about the missing page), and on her return to Bangkok the drama began to unfold.

At immigration she was arrested, escorted off for interrogation, after which she was searched then dumped in an airport detention centre lockup with thirty other male and female would-be immigrants.

She was threatened with being flown back to Indonesia where she would be jailed for two weeks, but instead the preferred option seemed to be to keep her in Bangkok.

She made two statements of the obvious: her time in Bangkok Airport’s holding cell was “horrific”, and that, at the airport, “corruption was shocking”.

Eventually, after help from friends, family, the British Embassy and Emirates, she was released.

She said that the experience ruined her trip, that it cost her “a huge amount of money” (although she diplomatically fails to specify how) and left her feeling humiliated as the guards marching her through the airport callously laughed at her hysterical state.

I don’t know what the usual procedure would be for people with pages missing from their passports arriving at any international airport, but I'm pretty sure it isn't this.

Surely it would be better to just refuse them entry at immigration, rather than let them be sucked into the murky bowels of Bangkok airport for further "processing'.

The unfortunate result of such heavy-handed treatment is that Thailand and Bangkok airport are routinely dragged through the mud, internationally, when traumatized victims of airport excesses get back to their own countries and complain to their national press as loudly as possible, as this victim did.