There Is a Police Force in Thailand Whose Entire Job Is Tourists
Dial 1155 and you reach a police force that speaks your language, is not part of the chain of command you are imagining, and will actually turn up.
A man on Koh Samui took my phone, walked into the sea with it, and returned twenty minutes later to tell me he had found it. The person who found it told a staff member, who called the Tourist Police, who sent a patrol, who located the man, who made him hand it back.
That entire chain exists because Thailand runs a police service specifically for this.
Last verified 1 August 2026.
What the Tourist Police actually are
A branch of the Royal Thai Police with a national mandate for tourism, staffed largely by officers with English language capability and a genuine mandate to help visitors rather than to process offences.
They are not the regular police, they are not a tourist assistance hotline in the sense of a call centre, and they have real powers. They investigate, they attend, and they can take action on a complaint.
And they are free. There is no charge for their help and nobody is going to ask you for a fee.
When to dial 1155
When you have been overcharged and the vendor will not fix it, which is the single most common use and the one they are genuinely set up to resolve. A TPT officer will turn up at the shop or the bar and the dynamic of the situation changes entirely.
Lost property, including the case above, and including on islands where the local police may not have the language or the inclination.
Scams in progress, the fake gem shops, the closed-shop taxi meter disputes, the ATM card retention, the tuk-tuk tour that became a demand for money.
Anything where a foreigner is being targeted specifically, which is a category the Tourist Police take more seriously than a general call would.
And when you genuinely do not know what to do, which is more often than people admit. They will tell you whether something is a crime, a civil dispute, a misunderstanding, or a complete non-issue, and that is real value.
When to use the regular police instead
For anything involving violence, serious crime, or a missing person, dial 191. The Tourist Police will route it but you want the right service on the line.
For a medical emergency, that is 1669 for an ambulance. The Tourist Police are not a medical service and they will help you find one.
For fire, that is 199. And for the police on a specific island, knowing the local station number and the local officer's name is genuinely useful, and 1155 will give it to you.
The complaints route, which is the underrated part
For anything that is not urgent, there is a formal complaint process and it is worth knowing about because it is the mechanism that produces actual consequences rather than a scene in a bar at midnight.
Get a reference number. Every complaint should produce one, and without one nothing can be followed up. Write it down at the time.
Write down what happened while it is fresh and get the address of the business, the date, the amount, and if there is a receipt or a photo, keep it. A complaint without a specific business is a complaint that cannot be actioned.
And follow up. The reference number is the thing that makes the complaint a record rather than a conversation, and a record is what changes behaviour the third time somebody has one.
The limits, honestly
They cannot make a shop give you money back if there was no overcharging, and they will not invent an offence to be helpful to somebody they like.
They are not going to recover property months later, and anybody who promises you that about a lost phone is telling you a story.
Language ability outside English is uneven, particularly for Chinese, Russian and Japanese speakers in the tourist areas, and it is worth being realistic about that if it applies to you.
And in genuinely remote areas, response times are real response times and not the four minutes of a city hotel concierge.
The one to have on your phone
Save 1155 in your phone before you arrive, along with 191, 1669 and 199. Looking it up while somebody is holding your bag costs you ten minutes of authority you would have had for free.
And screenshot it. A phone with no signal and a dead battery is the exact situation in which a number you can read in the dark is worth more than a contact you have to scroll to.
