What the TDAC is and is not
The TDAC is an online arrival card, filed at tdac.immigration.go.th before you travel. It is not a visa, it does not grant entry, and it costs nothing; it simply tells Thai immigration who is arriving, on what flight, and where they will stay. Indian passport holders still enter under the sixty-day visa exemption or whatever visa they hold; the TDAC sits alongside that, not instead of it. Every traveller needs one, including infants, including transit passengers who will clear immigration, and including travellers who come to Thailand every month and have never been asked a question in their lives.
The official site is tdac.immigration.go.th and the card is free. Third-party sites charge for the same filing and some are simply scams. Verify current requirements with the Thai Immigration Bureau before travel; procedures change with little notice.
The seventy-two-hour window
The card can be filed within seventy-two hours before arrival, which in practice means three days out. Filing on the day of the flight works and many people do it from the departure lounge, but it is a poor habit: if a passport number is mistyped or the site is slow, you want hours in hand, not minutes. Our office files at the start of the window, roughly three days before the flight, and treats the confirmation as part of the travel documents, saved to the phone and printed. If the flight changes after filing, file a fresh card with the new details; it takes five minutes and removes any mismatch at the counter.
Filing for a family
One card per passport. The system allows a group filing so a family can be entered in one sitting, but each traveller gets an individual card and an individual QR confirmation. The details must match each passport exactly: the name as printed in the machine-readable line, the passport number without transposed digits, the date of birth in the format the form asks for. For a party of eight spanning three generations, this is twenty minutes of careful clerical work, which is precisely why it should not be done in a taxi to the airport. Children's cards are filed by the parents; the accommodation field for the whole party is simply the first night's hotel or residence address.
What the form asks
- Passport details: name exactly as printed, number, nationality, date of birth.
- Trip details: arrival date, flight number, purpose of visit; holiday or business as the case honestly is.
- Accommodation in Thailand: the first night's address; a hotel name and district is sufficient.
- Contact details: a working email, since the confirmation arrives there.
- A brief health declaration when public health rules require one.
The errors we actually see
After several hundred filings a season, the same handful of errors accounts for nearly all the trouble. Passport numbers with a zero and the letter O swapped. The name entered as it appears on the ticket rather than the passport, which matters when the two differ, as they often do for married names and initials expanded by airlines. The accommodation field filled with a villa's marketing name rather than an address. A card filed for the original flight and never refiled after a rebooking. And the largest single error: one member of a large family, usually a grandparent or an infant, with no card at all because everyone assumed someone else had filed it. The fix for all of these is the same: one person files for the whole party in one sitting, from the passports themselves, and checks the confirmations against a list.
Airline checks at Indian airports
Check-in staff at Delhi, Mumbai and the other metros increasingly ask to see TDAC confirmations before issuing boarding passes for Bangkok and Phuket flights, alongside the usual return-ticket check. Policy varies by airline and even by agent, which is exactly why it cannot be relied on to be lenient. A family that reaches the counter without cards will usually be pointed at the website and told to file on the spot, standing at the desk, on airport Wi-Fi, with the queue watching. It always works out and it is always miserable. Carry the QR confirmations in print as well as on phones; paper does not depend on a battery or a network.
At the Thai counter
On arrival the card mostly disappears into the background: immigration systems have the filing already, and many travellers are never asked to show anything. Occasionally an officer asks to see the QR code, and the meet-and-greet staff at Suvarnabhumi will ask for it when escorting a party through the premium lanes. Have it reachable in two taps or one pocket. The card is per entry, so a side trip to Singapore or a weekend in Phnom Penh means filing a fresh TDAC for the return; frequent regional travellers should simply make it part of the booking ritual, alongside the seat selection.
Children, staff and the travelling household
Larger households travel with more passports than the immediate family: a nanny, a cook for a long stay, occasionally a personal assistant or a security detail. Every one of them files a TDAC on their own passport, and the sensible arrangement is that whoever manages the family's travel holds clear scans of every passport in the party, staff included, so the filing is one sitting rather than a chase across WhatsApp for photographs of documents. Children's cards are straightforward but easy to forget precisely because children do so little at borders; the infant on a lap needs a card as surely as the principal does. Where staff travel on different flights, ahead with the luggage or behind with the house, each flight's party files against its own flight number, and a change to any leg means a refiling for the people on that leg only.
Keep the confirmations until the trip ends. The QR codes are occasionally useful at hotel check-in when a front desk wants arrival details, and having every family member's card in one folder, phone and paper both, means any question at any counter is answered in seconds by whoever is standing there. This is small, dull discipline, and it is exactly the kind of discipline that separates a smooth family movement from a scramble.
How our office handles it
For clients, TDAC filing is a standing service item: passports are on file, the desk files at seventy-two hours, confirmations go into the family's shared folder and into the arrival pack handed to the driver. Nobody in the family thinks about it, which is the correct amount of thought for an arrival card. If you run your own filing, the discipline to copy is the checklist: file early in the window, file from the passports, one card per person, refile on any flight change, and print. The TDAC is genuinely simple; it only ever becomes complicated at a check-in desk with forty minutes to departure.
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This briefing is general information, not legal, tax or investment advice. Thai rules change frequently and individual cases differ. Verify current requirements with the relevant authorities, including the Immigration Bureau, the Board of Investment, the Land Department, the Department of Business Development and the Revenue Department, and take advice on your own facts before acting.
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