The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) has set up an on-site Safety and Health Administration (SHA) clinic to let more restaurants in Bangkok obtain SHA certificates to serve alcoholic drinks.
After the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration allowed only SHA certified restaurants to sell alcohol from Nov 1, more restaurants want to join the campaign which caused the SHA website to crash due to heavy traffic.
"The SHA certificate was introduced in May last year to assure tourists of the high level of safety with operators, especially in Phuket, showing the strongest interest with over 40% registered between July and October this year," said Thapanee Kiatphaibool, TAT deputy governor for domestic marketing.
As of Nov 5, the SHA standard has been granted to 20,608 operators, and 5,068 operators for SHA Plus which require 70% of workers to be fully inoculated.
There are 4,573 operators in Bangkok qualified for SHA standard, of which 2,394 are restaurants, followed by 690 hotels and 453 tour operators.
Meanwhile, 513 operators in the capital have already obtained SHA Plus, including 374 hoteliers, followed by 37 tour operators and 27 restaurants.
Ms Thapanee said the number of SHA restaurants in Bangkok has significantly increased to 2,394 from approximately 1,000 restaurants prior to November.
She said TAT expanded its SHA website network bandwidth capacity to support online traffic, so the website's congestion should be solved by next week.
In addition, operators can go directly to TAT headquarters to apply for SHA certification from Nov 5-19, from 10am to 4pm by preparing the required documents like business registration certificates and photos of their standardised services that comply with safety and health measures.
The whole process of obtaining SHA and SHA Plus will be completed within three days after submitting the documents.
She said besides Bangkok, the model of on-site SHA clinic might expand to other tourism areas which have high demand from operators for the certificate, such as Phuket.
In terms of Bangkok's reopening, the TAT has arranged meetings with other ministries and agencies, particularly Airports of Thailand (AoT), to fix issues that tourists faced.
Ms Thapanee said the problem of slow entry process at Suvarnabhumi airport has been improved as tourists on the first flight arrived yesterday waited for no longer than 30 minutes after the AoT brought in more staff to manage the flow of travellers.