The big trap for young players is where you can travel somewhere visa free (or effectively so) for a holiday, but doing business or work (even if you’re being paid outside that country) requires a visa (or one that’s harder to get than the “Issued as a formality at the airport” type).
Exactly. Pre-Internet days, when there were no websites to check, I was planning a visit to Australia, and had heard that I’d need a visa. I confirmed this with a phone call to the nearest Australian consulate, which happened to be in Toronto (where I was living at the time). Yes, they said, you will need a tourist visa, and I can pick up an application at their office, or they could mail me one. Since they were in an office building not far from where I was working, it was an easy errand on a lunch break; and after filling out the visa application, it was another easy errand on the next day’s lunch break. The consulate clerk pasted the visa in my passport, and I was good to go.
Not so for the fellow traveller ahead of me at the check-in desk at Toronto airport. He had no Australian visa of any kind, and though his tickets were bought and paid for, he was not going to be allowed on the plane. Based on his comments to the clerk, he made the mistake of assuming that since Australia and Canada were both Commonwealth members, he (as a Canadian) needed no visa for Australia. In the end, of course, he was denied his flight. Me, I got to Australia, had no problems entering with my Canadian passport and Australian visa, and had a great time.
Lesson here: No matter what you hear from others, or think you can do, get visa information straight from the country or countries you will be visiting. With the internet, it is so easy to do, that there is no excuse.
Wikitravel has information, usually up to date, on visas. Sometimes it is more useful than what you might get from the embassy. For example, if you’re already enroute, you may be able to get visas with varying degrees of difficulty from consulates abroad. China is notorious for this, often changing their policies from day to day at overseas Chinese embassies.
I’ve heard that Pakistan is a visa nightmare. The visa has to be attained from the embassy in your country of nationality or legal residence, you have to have the round trip ticket already purchased, it takes a minimum of a month to get the visa, and they very often simply refuse the visa with no explanation, after youve paid the non-refundable visas fee and bought a non-refundable ticket.
I also met a traveler who told me he arrived at Guinea and was told by a border official that his visa was not valid, and he had to go back to Dakar and get another one, but I met him in Chile, so I guess he got in…
Another with a Chinese passport went to the Chilean consul in Tacna Peru, and was told he did not need one. Chile sent him back to Tacna for a visa, he want back, and again the consul told him “Go back there and tell them I said you don’t need one”. I can’t remember what happened after that.
Third-party companies arranging visas are generally a rip-off. Just do it yourself. It’s usually not difficult. Some countries insist you arrange it ahead of time. Others like Singapore just get it on arrival, no problem. Thailand will give you one on arrival but a longer one if you arrange it in advance. When we traveled overland into Cambodia in 2003, we arranged our visa ahead of time due to first-hand reports of Cambodian officials at the border ripping off travelers for an extra $5 per personfor a visa on arrival; but then the year before last, flying into Cambodia we got one on arrival in the airport, and it was all above board. It just depends.
In this Internet age, it’s easy to check the requirements. But I have to laugh at all the shlubs paying good extra money for some company in Nong Khai, Thailand for the same visa to Laos you’ll get walking across the bridge and just filling out the form yourself in person.
This is important also. I have vacationed in the US frequently, and as a Canadian, all I need to satisfy the US border guard is my passport and the words “personal trip” or “vacation.” They may follow up with a question or two to make sure it really is a vacation, but if the replies fit (“I’m going to Las Vegas; looking forward to seeing some shows and doing some gambling,” for example), there’s generally no problem.
Where there has been more than a few questions, has been when I used to travel to the US for business. Typically, I’d go to planning meetings involving company personnel from both countries (for example, “How can our US and Canadian operations work together better over the next few years? Let’s get the Americans and Canadians in a Chicago conference room for a week and talk about it.”) or training courses (where I was a trainee). For such things as these, no visa was required, though there were always a few extra questions from US Immigration to make sure that I was not performing a job that an American could do instead. But a secondment to work in the US office, even for a week or two? A working visa would be required.
Again: Always check with the country you’ll be going to.
The only time I’ve used somebody else it’s been when Corporate said I had to. Most of my travel doesn’t require visas, but I check in advance any time I’m going outside the EU. If the website of whichever country’s embassy isn’t clear, I’ll contact them to make sure what the requirements are. There’s been only one time I got a visa on arrival and I’d actually already had one: I pointed the old one out to the customs officer and he let out a mild curse, scratched the new one, made a note in his log that its number was invalid and noted down the number of the valid one.
Being from Spain, I can travel to all the EU without visas and to most of Latin America either with no visa or “they’ll stamp your passport on arrival” so long as I’m staying less than 90 days. This applies even if it’s a business visit if I’m not being paid from the country I’m visiting; being paid from there is what moves it from “real long business visit” to “works here”. We call it the “Telefónica engineer” model, as they made it common knowledge.
Saying that I’m not impressed with the lawyer my employers used c. 2001 is a British-level euphemism. Dude was a thief and so absurdly clumsy about his thieving, I kind of hope the people from Corporate were getting kickbacks from him: the other explanation would require such enormous levels of stupidity that thinking about it makes my head hurt.
If in doubt, phone an airline that flies to that country. Airlines have a strong incentive to be up to date on visa requirements. If you need a visa and arrive without one, the airline that flew you in is responsible for flying you back out. The airlines do not expose themselves to that kind of liability, and they will not board you on the flight if your passport does not meet the entry requirements of the destination country.
The map says you get a “Visa on arrival” in India. I was there in 2005 and had to get a visa prior to going. A woman I work with went last year and had to get a visa prior to going. I think that map has some inaccuracies.
This is why you should always check before travelling 
I have a business visa for India but my wife came over with me two years ago and got her tourist visa on arrival. She had to fill out a quick online form before going but she got her visa at the airport after arrival. It’s a relatively new process.
It can differ according to how and where you arrive. In Suriname, you can get visa at the airport when you arrive, but if you come in by land from Guyana, you need to get the tourist card at the embassy in Georgetown. Also, Ethiopia issues the visa on arrival only by air into Addis Ababe. If you enter by land, or fly into Dire Dawa, you need the visa in advance.
This one isn’t so much for individual travelers, but…
I am going to travel next week; business trip. Trip was originally a triangle, A->B then B->C. I proposed making it C->B return instead, as the price differences I was seeing were huge and leaving from C was perfectly convenient for me.
For the triangle, the prices from the travel agent are about twice as high as buying directly from the companies. The return trip, while much cheaper than the triangle, is more than twice as expensive through the travel agent over what I get looking at direct purchase.
So if you’re in charge of corporate travel - check if your agents are ripping you off. They’re supposed to get paid a decent salary, but not to get a whole month’s salary out of a single plane trip.
So in other words she had to be approved before leaving the U.S. which is not much different than getting a visa before leaving. They were just holding it for her there.
Yes, it seems to be a much easier process than what you (and I) went through, but it doesn’t seem to be one of those cases where you can land and just get a visa right then and there without a previous application. You have to apply online 4-30 days before arrival (as you have found). The Indian government itself calls it a “visa on arrival,” though. So, I suppose it’s how technical you want to be about it.
It also appears the definition of visa on arrival is a bit broader:
So it appears VOA is a somewhat confusing term that comes with caveats, depending on the country you’re dealing with.
What surprised me about Australia was that I needed a transit visa just to travel through an airport there en route to another country. It was easy enough to obtain over the internet, but they checked for it before I left Los Angeles and I would have been screwed if I had not known I needed it.
I was en route to Papua New Guinea, which has visa-on-arrival. I filled out a bunch of forms on line in advance, but when I arrived they never looked at them but just stamped my passport.
But it does sound better than having to mail your passport to an embassy or consulate. I always get a tad nervous when I have to do that. But I’ve been more nervous:
True story: 2 years ago I booked a trip to Rio. I included a friend and his wife as he had helped me out greatly on a real estate deal I was getting fucked over on. What I didn’t do was tell my wife. She thought we were going to Miami for 2 weeks (we were only changing planes in Miami). But you have to get a visa before leaving. So I had to con her into getting a photo taken and I may have used clandestine methods to get her signature on the application. Imagine my nervousness while at the Brazilian Embassy in Chicago. But it went through alright.
Then they had to Fed Ex the passports back. Believe it or not they came the same day a television I had ordered arrived, so my wife thought the Fed Ex envelopes were with that and didn’t ask any questions.
Imagine her surprise at MIA when we let her know that we were just changing planes and actually going to Rio. She’d been going on and on for years how she wanted to visit Rio again. She was ecstatic! And not at all mad about my major con job. I had even printed up fake reservation sheets for a hotel in Miami.
At the time the exchange rate was almost 5 to 1. I felt like a billionaire. It was like Monopoly money. We had an insane time.
Get a black briefcase that opens at the top. Stow it behind your knees. These keeps your foot area clear. If you need anything just reach down and get it. Why black? So the flight attendant is less likely to see it.
I’m curious about this part as I almost had it come into play. We had been doing a driving tour of Germany/France/Switzerland/Liechtenstein/Austria and had done quite a bit of shopping along the way. When we got to our hotel for the last night, we were unloading the car and I was moving stuff into bags. I went to check in and couldn’t find my passport. Panic ensued. I knew I had a backup picture of it in my email and it was Sunday so the embassy wasn’t open. Luckily I found it in time, just wondering if the embassy would take a picture of the passport or is a paper photocopy better?