That travel pattern involves short stays with clear breaks outside Thailand and does not resemble continuous or repeated long stays within the same cycle. As long as you have an onward or return ticket, accommodation details, and can show funds if asked, this is within what immigration normally accepts under the visa exemption system itself. There is no fixed “two entries per year” rule in the regulations, that idea comes from misunderstandings around border run practices, not from any codified policy. With short stays and longer periods abroad and home of domicile, your travel clearly fits ordinary tourism and is not what the new formalised guidelines are aimed at. As always, entry is at the discretion of the IO you meet, but nothing you describe should raise any red flags under normal circumstances.

If you don’t have any recent previous extensive travel history to Thailand a multiple-entry tourist visa would be unnecessary and overkill for such short, clearly touristic visits, and with everything booked as described you should normally have no issues entering on two visa exemptions.

Some immigration offices do accept joint accounts, but the balance must be sufficient for both parties to qualify. In your case, when applying for an extension based on marriage, the account would still need to show 800,000 baht, even though your spouse is Thai, since formally only half of the funds are considered to belong to you.

@Wayne *******

Yes, a visa is technically and procedurally just an authorisation required to cross the border if you are not eligible for visa exemption. The stamp you receive at the border is, in technical terms, the permission to stay that the visa or the visa exemption entitles you to. You then apply for a further extension of that permission to stay. The terminology is not particularly important, as long as you understand what you are applying for and what status you are actually granted.

For the DTV, each applicant is assessed individually, including dependants. In practice this means that the financial requirement applies per DTV application, not per household, and children also require their own DTV if they are staying long term under this scheme, even if they are under 16. As a general rule, the 500,000 baht requirement therefore applies per applicant, including children, unless the specific embassy explicitly applies a different internal policy, and some embassies may accept the financial requirement for children to be satisfied through a financial guarantee as a sponsor letter issued by one or both parents, but this is not standardised and must be clarified directly with the relevant embassy or consulate before applying.

You do not renew a DTV, but you can apply for a 180-day extension for 1900 baht at immigration with largely the same documentation requirements as for the original visa application, including proving 500 000 baht in your account. In practice, very few people choose to do this, and most simply leave Thailand briefly or do a border bounce to obtain a new 180-day stay. This can be done as many times as you wish within the five-year validity period of the multiple-entry visa. You must file a 90-day report each time you have stayed in Thailand for 90 consecutive days.

Certainly not ideal, but if you have no other option, it is possible to apply with the regular minimum of six months passport validity and carry both passports together with the visa, which remains valid for the full five-year period. The passport should have at least six months validity for the first entry.

@Wayne *******

A single-entry Non-Immigrant visa is indeed used up once you enter Thailand. If you leave Thailand after that entry, the visa cannot be reused. However, once you obtain an extension of stay, you are no longer staying on the visa itself but on a temporary permission to stay based on the stay the Non O gave you. The point here is simply that it was the IO who was mixing up the terminology.

@Graham *****

Yes, because the underlying visa is already used, and what you hold at that point is only a temporary permission to stay, which does not survive departure unless a re-entry permit is obtained. That is precisely why the re-entry permit is required, -it’s not a visa anymore.

Good, but you should have asked why you could not leave and re-enter without purchasing a re-entry permit, since you still had a valid visa and not only a temporary permission to stay.