Saturday, April 14, 2012

Pre-trip Planning: Passports and visas

Visas are required for entry to many places across the globe and can be both time consuming and costly to obtain. While certain countries allow visas to be obtained immediately upon entry, other countries require that visas be obtained stateside prior to trip departure. This means you have to mail your passport back-and-forth to embassies or enlist the help of third-party agencies to do so on your behalf. The whole process can not only be expensive, but it can take weeks or months and you’re without passport the whole time.

This was a problem for us, because both of us needed service completed on our passports. Prior trips had left us with very few blank passport pages, which meant that we needed to ship our passports off to a passport agency and pay the $82 fee required to add additional pages. This service had an estimated processing time of six weeks and presumed added delivery time meant we were a bit close for comfort on obtaining any special visas.

Our required passport service immediately ruled out travel to countries with finicky visa policies, which in some ways has been a blessing in disguise as we’ve had a hard enough time limiting our travel scope and sticking to our budget.

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