The part I don’t understand is that a Thai citizen can presumably stay in Thailand indefinitely with no visa even after her passport expires.
I could totally see a problem with getting back into the US, but that didn’t seem to be the issue as presented.
I don’t get it. Why would Thai nationals need a visa to stay in their own country?
Does the OP’s wife have both a U.S. passport and a Thai passport? If so the solution would seem to be just to also present the Thai passport.
I absolutely detest bureaucracy without sense. The six month rule is reasonable for countries as they need to insist that you have a valid passport as a condition of visiting or staying there, but it’s silly for airlines that you would be transiting through. As you do not clear customers in either Seoul or Narita, it would be only under the most extraordinary circumstances, and almost certainly the airline’s fault, that one would have to clear customs.
Well, I suppose there may be a remote possibility of a medical emergency.
No. The OP‘s wife has a green card but not US citizenship, so only a Thai passport.
I think you received a tourist visa without knowing it.
In many countries, the entry stamp they put in your passport when you get off the plane is the visa. It allows you to stay for 89 days.And only 89 days.
If you want to continue playing tourist for more than three months, or if you want to get a job in that country, then you need to get a “real” visa.
It is in fact these risks that just - what is for you a remote possibility is a significant risk exposure for the airline when it is multiplied over the thousands and thousands of passengers transiting daily.
The airline must in this case make its policy on its grand exposure not on your specific risk, but on the aggregated risk and the risk it faces over long exposure to the fines and other costs in a hub - medical emergencies, other kinds of emergencies out of its own control that could force a visa need and so if a passenger has some kind of problem obliging a entry into a transit country - not being sure of the facilities in each transit hub case.
It is of course also easier to apply as the general rule, rather than having the agents have to master the subtle details of each nationality passing through each transit hub case where the potential of the errors rises enormously.
They don’t. That’s what he was saying.
IOW, since passports/visas are NOT needed for a Thai citizen to stay in Thailand, why do they care.
No, in our case the stamp wasn’t a Visa: there usually wasn’t even a stamp. Spain and many of her daughters have agreements by which we specifically don’t get Visas when visiting each other. The “no Visa” situation allows work as well, so long as you’re not being paid in the same country in which you work. Of the Latin American countries I entered under the 89 days policy (one of them twice for the same gig), my passport only got stamped in Argentina. Other countries kept a record of entry but with no passport markers. Same for Latin American coworkers coming to Spain, no stamps.
I’m sure that was true in your situation - as a US citizen, I don’t need a visa to visit Canada for less than six months, they don’t stamp my passport and if there is any sort of passport control it has been completely invisible to me every time I’ve crossed the border.
But **chappachula ** is correct as well- before I went to Tel Aviv last month, I checked to see if US citizens need a visa. And all the information I could find said “no”.
But the permit they gave me when I arrived, which allowed me to stay for 90 days is functionally a visa and is described as such on the Israel Foreign Affairs Ministry website. It’s not exactly that US citizens don’t need a visa - it’s that they don’t need to apply in advance.
That’s my point - given this fact, how could there possibly be any issue with a Thai citizen traveling to Thailand, even if their passport was about to expire?
Read the discussion above - it is the question arising because of the lack of the direct flight from the United States to the Thailand. The transiting of the third country creates the problem.
I don’t think this is true, since I pass through an exit control at Dulles everytime I fly out of the country, and they scan my passport before I board the train that takes me to gate area.
Are you a US citizen ? If so, I think you may be mixing up different things - when you take any flight departing from a US airport, the TSA wants acceptable ID and a boarding pass before you go through security. The airline wants to make sure you will be able to enter your destination country (since if you can’t, they will have to fly you back to the US) and therefore ensure you have a passport with enough pages/time and any necessary visas - but I’ve never encountered anyone from Customs and Border Protection checking my passport when I leave the US the way they check when I return.
There is apparently a test of a biometric exit control system going on at Dulles - but only for non-citizens.When we went to Istanbul from Chicago this spring, I was surprised to see a collection of border control agents actually checking some people’s passports as they were boarding the aircraft and pulling some people aside. I have never seen anything like that before. I assumed it was due to the proximity of Turkey to Syria.
True, they are definitely TSA. But I’ve never flown domestic from Dulles, so I’ve only ever seen them checking and scanning passports. Plus strange bits of cloth on a stick that they go and check for explosive residue 
Correct. As mentioned, the wife has another year to go before she can apply for US citizenship and obtain a US passport. Right now, she has only her Thai passport, being a citizen of only that nation.
Pardon me for misunderstanding. But again, yes, there would be no issue if there were direct flights to Thailand from the US. There are not. She must transit through one or two airports in other countries. That is what has the airlines concerned, because it could mean fines for them if she were to go hog wild and try to enter that country instead of reboarding for her onward journey.
So the wife did call the Thai consulate in Los Angeles yesterday morning. They confirmed bad juju was possible if she attempted to fly home with less than six months on her passport. They also confirmed the relative ease with which she could obtain the aforementioned one-year temporary passport to bolster her present one, obtainable without having to appear in person at the consulate. They also confirmed the aforementioned mobile consulates and said they usually came to Honolulu in early January. Said the schedule for them would be up on the website in mid-November. So it looks like she can get back to Thailand incident-free after all.
An update: The Los Angeles consulate’s mobile consulate will not come to Hawaii until next March, about the time the wife’s passport expires. But it will be in San Francisco this weekend, and unlike in Los Angeles the wife has friends she can stay with in the Bay area. So she’s made an appointment with the mobile consulate and will fly to California on Friday to arrange a new passport, which should be mailed to her here about a month later.