The immigration cards are seen as outdated and a hassle for the travelling public.

The hassle of filling in the Thai immigration cards, those rectangular white slips with blue text, is here to stay after all.

While the Prime Minister's Office recently suggested the Immigration Bureau should do away with the age-old requirement in order to provide convenience to travellers and ease the passport control process, the Ministry of Tourism and Sports has suddenly come out against such a move.

Minister Kobkarn Wattanavrangkul insists that the immigration card, known as the Tor Mor 6 or TM.6, should not be abolished because the information that non-Thai residents fill in is useful for tourism analysis.

In particular, the details about the occupation, country of residence, port of embarkation, onward destination, accommodation type, purpose of visit and yearly income of each traveller.

On the other hand, the airline industry, travel agencies and travelling public question the usefulness and accuracy of this information and whether it's enough to justify keeping the requirement.

"How can the ministry be sure that all the information filled in is correct and really useful?'' asked Louis Moser, chairman of the Airline Operators Committee (AOC), a coalition of over 80 international airlines and 26 aviation service providers operating at Suvarnabhumi, Thailand's gateway airport.

The immigration card also duplicates information stored in the advance passenger processing system (AAPS) which costs each air passenger 35 baht and is held in the Immigration Bureau's system.

"It is outdated and unnecessarily complicates the passport control process. Most of the countries have already done away with it,'' he told the Bangkok Post.

"In this age of biometric facial recognition technology and the like, does this piece of paper still serve a purpose?"

The AOC has advocated abolishing the TM.6 for over a decade, but their calls have generally fallen on deaf ears. However, in a new turn of events, it is the Tourism Ministry which, out of the blue, has come out to oppose the termination rather than the Immigration Bureau itself, according to Mr Moser.

Conrad Clifford, regional vice president for Asia Pacific at the International Air Transport Association (IATA), is in agreement with modernising the procedure.

"There is definitely an opportunity to streamline this process and make the travel experience more seamless through better use of the advanced passenger information data sent by airlines, and other technologies," he told the Bangkok Post yesterday.

An example of this is America, which uses self-service immigration kiosks for visitors entering the US.

It will also be one less burden for airlines, who have to ensure availability and distribution of these cards, either before boarding or on board the flights. But the most important impact is on the passenger, he said.

"Airlines are in many cases required to obtain information from passengers electronically in advance of travel, who then find it very frustrating being asked yet again for, often, exactly the same information in a paper and pen format," said Mr Clifford.

"As an industry, we did away with paper tickets in 2008. It's long overdue for government agencies to take the paper out of the travel process, something which the industry fully supports in the interests of ease of travel, efficiency and sustainability."

A Thai female executive, who spends 5-6 months a year travelling abroad and asked to be referred to as Khun Somsri, also raised several issues.

"As a Thai passport holder, we always have to go through the so-called auto-gate when we depart and return to Thailand.

"At that point, they collect information on our passport data page, fingerprint, photo and flight number so I'm not sure why we still need to fill in the immigration form.

"There are many countries now that no longer require this and I think it's time we reconsider whether this is still a necessary process."

Each Thai immigration card, printed by the Royal Thai Police's printing house, costs airlines 80 satang.

There were more than 60 million travellers who had to fill in an immigration card last year, and, of that number, some 32 million were foreign visitors.