What to Do After a Road Accident in Thailand

Stop. Check whether anyone is hurt. If anyone is, call 1669 for an ambulance before you do anything else. Then leave the vehicles where they are, call the police or the Tourist Police on 1155, and telephone your rental company or your insurer so that they can send a surveyor to the scene. You do not exchange details and drive away in Thailand. You wait.

That last sentence is the part visitors get wrong, because it is the opposite of what most of us are taught at home. In Thailand a motor claim is normally settled at the roadside, that afternoon, by claims surveyors sent out by the two insurers, working from the positions of the vehicles and what the police say. If you drive off before that happens, you have walked away from the only process that decides who pays.

• Ambulance and medical emergency1669
• Tourist Police, English-speaking1155
• Highway Police1193
• Expressway incident1543, option 1

The order to do things in

Work down this list. It is written so that the most urgent thing is always at the top, and so that you can follow it on a phone screen with your hands shaking.

1. Stop, and stay stopped. Switch the engine off. On a bike, get it and yourself out of the traffic stream if you can do it in a few seconds; in a car, put the hazard lights on.
2. Check yourself, then everyone else. Adrenaline hides injuries for ten or fifteen minutes. Look for bleeding, obvious deformity, and anyone who is confused or not fully conscious.
3. Call 1669 if anyone is injured — you, a passenger, the other driver, a pedestrian. It is the national emergency medical number, it is free, and it is the right call even if you are not sure how bad the injury is.
4. Make the scene safe. Get uninjured people off the carriageway and behind something solid. On a fast road, this matters more than the vehicles do.
5. Photograph everything before anything moves. Wide shots showing both vehicles in position relative to the road, then close-ups of damage, then plates, then the road itself — skid marks, debris, the junction, the signs.
6. Call the police, or 1155. The Tourist Police line puts an English speaker on the phone, which changes the character of the next hour completely.
7. Call your rental company or your insurer. They send the surveyor. On a hire vehicle this call is contractual — most agreements require it immediately.
8. Wait. Do not agree anything, do not sign anything, do not hand money over, and do not let the vehicles be moved until the police or the surveyors have seen them, unless you are being told to move by an officer or the position is genuinely dangerous.
9. Get seen at a hospital if there is any doubt at all, and keep every piece of paper you are given.

Who to call, and what each number gets you

The honest ranking for a foreign driver is: 1669 for injuries, 1155 for everything else. 191 is the number every guidebook prints and it is genuinely the general emergency line, but it is answered in Thai — and a caller in shock describing a location in a language they do not speak is not in a good position. 1155 is the fastest route to someone who can translate.

Why you wait instead of exchanging details

At home, the aftermath of a minor collision is administrative: names, insurers, policy numbers, photographs, and a claim filed a week later. Thailand does it differently, and the difference is the surveyor.

Thai motor insurers keep claims staff on motorbikes and in small cars whose job is to attend accident scenes. Each insurer sends its own. They photograph the positions, take an account from each driver, talk to each other, and between them settle which vehicle was at fault and which policy pays. If a driver's own policy covers the damage, the surveyor issues a claim document at the scene that authorises repair at an approved garage. It is fast, it is normal, and for anyone with proper cover it is the point at which the accident stops being a problem.

Two things follow from that, and both are the reason you stay put:

• Fault is agreed at the scene, not adjudicated later. If you are not there, with your vehicle where it stopped, the version of events that gets recorded is the other driver's.
• The paperwork generated at the scene is what everyone downstream wants. Rental companies, insurers and hospitals all ask for the police report and the claim document. Producing neither, a fortnight later, from another country, is a losing position.

The surveyor is worth understanding properly before you need one, and the insurance surveyor at a Thai accident scene explains who they work for, what they can and cannot decide, and how to handle one who is not yours. How fault is actually decided covers the rest of it.

What to photograph, in order

Your phone is the most useful thing you own for the next hour. Take far more than you think you need, and take it in this order, because if you are moved on you will at least have the important frames.

1. Two or three wide shots from different angles showing both vehicles where they stopped, with the road, the lane markings and any junction visible.
2. The other vehicle's registration plate, clearly readable.
3. Damage to both vehicles, close up, from several angles.
4. The road surface: skid marks, gravel, spilled fluid, debris, the pothole or sand patch if one was involved.
5. Signs, signals and road markings that bear on who had priority.
6. The other driver's licence and, if there is one, the compulsory insurance sticker on the windscreen.
7. A short video panning across the whole scene, narrating what you can see. It records things you will not think to photograph.

Injuries: what you can usefully do

Call 1669 first. Beyond that, keep to basics: do not move anyone who is unconscious or complaining of neck or back pain unless leaving them where they are is more dangerous than moving them; apply firm direct pressure to heavy bleeding with whatever clean cloth you have; keep an injured person still, shaded and talked to. Leave helmets on unless the person is not breathing. Anything more than that is for the paramedics, who are coming.

Ambulances in Thailand are dispatched through 1669 but delivered by a mix of hospital services and volunteer rescue foundations, so the vehicle that arrives may be a foundation's rather than a hospital's. That is normal and it is not a sign that something has gone wrong.

Grazes and burns from a scooter spill look trivial and are not, in this climate — road rash and exhaust burns explains why a wound that would scab over at home turns nasty here within a day or two. Thai hospitals after a crash and what it costs covers the government-versus-private question and how the deposit works.

The police report, and why you want one

A police report is the document that lets everything else happen. Insurers want it. Rental companies want it. Your travel insurer will ask for it. If you are claiming against another driver, it is the backbone of the claim.

In practice, either an officer attends the scene, or the drivers are asked to come to the local station to make statements and the report is written there. Officers may take some time to arrive, particularly outside cities and particularly if nobody is hurt. Waiting is still the right answer in most cases; should you call the police after a crash goes through the exceptions honestly, including the very small knocks where nobody sensibly involves them.

If the vehicle is a hire car or a rented scooter

Ring the rental company before you ring anyone except the emergency services. Their insurer's surveyor is the one attending, their agreement almost certainly requires immediate notification, and letting a repair be arranged privately is the fastest way to a fight over the deposit. Accident in a rental car or scooter covers the sequence, the excess and what happens to the money you left with them. If the argument afterwards is about a charge rather than the crash, the Renting section is where the dispute side lives — start with disputing a rental charge.

If it is your own machine, or one you have borrowed from a friend or a guesthouse, there is no rental company to absorb any of this and the position is different again: see crashing a bike you own or borrowed.

Money at the roadside

You will sometimes be offered, or asked for, a cash settlement on the spot. It is a normal way of dealing with a scraped mirror between two locals. For a visitor it is riskier: you cannot verify what you are settling, you have no receipt that means anything, and the payment does not protect you if the other party later goes to the police. Settling a minor accident at the roadside sets out when it is reasonable. The short version: never on a vehicle that is not yours, never where anyone is injured, and never before the surveyor has been.

If it is serious

Where someone has been badly hurt or killed, the process changes character. Failing to stop and assist after a collision carries, on the pre-2022 text of the Act, up to three months' imprisonment and a fine of 2,000–10,000 baht, rising to up to six months and 5,000–20,000 baht where serious injury or death results. A driver may be detained while an investigating officer works, and alcohol or the absence of a valid licence transforms the position. What happens if you are arrested after a crash describes the process step by step — and says plainly that at that point you want your embassy and a Thai lawyer, not a website.

The mistakes that cost the most

• Riding away from a minor collision "because nobody was hurt". It is the one thing that turns an insurance matter into a criminal one.
• Moving the vehicles before photographing them.
• Agreeing fault to be polite. An apology at a Thai roadside is heard the same way it is anywhere: as an admission.
• Signing a Thai-language statement on someone else's summary of it.
• Not calling the rental company, and letting a repair be arranged.
• Going back to the hotel to sleep it off after a head knock instead of being checked.
• Discovering afterwards that you had no cover because of the licence you hold — check whether you are legal to drive here before you ride, not after.

Before any of this happens

Most of what makes a Thai accident go badly for a visitor is decided in advance: the licence entitlement you hold, whether your travel policy covers the machine, whether you were wearing a helmet, and whether you have the numbers to hand. Does travel insurance cover driving in Thailand and what voids your motorbike cover are the two to read before you collect a bike; the biggest risk factors for visiting drivers and what the road-death statistics really say are the risk picture.

Frequently asked questions