Interesting, but how do you keep this up to date? These requirement change constantly and the only reliable source I'm aware of, Timatic (which is what airlines use), is copyrighted and quite tightly locked down.
You do have to be careful and read the fine print. This year, I was turned away at the Belarusian-Lithuanian border (US citizen) because I had read on that Wikipedia page that it was Visa free. In fact, it is only visa free if you arrive via the Minsk airport. Fortunately I was only driving through a tiny part of Belarus on my way to Poland so it was a simple matter of another 30 minutes or so of driving to enter Poland via the Lithuanian border.
To be fair, visa-free entry into Belarus for up to 30 days is a completely new thing[1]. Unlike most visa-free regimes, it's not driven by any international agreements, but rather by a Belarusian initiative to promote tourism in the country. Therefore, they can set their own requirements, and it's still not possible to take a 2-hour train from Vilnius to Minsk without a visa. The entire program can be cancelled at any time by one side, since Belarusians don't have the same visa-free access to the EU.
To be fair, Ukraine has the same unilateral visa-free regime for EU (plus some other countries) citizens. But it's not as arbitrary. If you are a citizen of one of the countries you can enter through any legal port of entry.
Edit. I keep forgetting that Ukraine now does have visa free travel with Schengen states.
I was confused by the order of countries and thought you were turned away by Lithuanians. Being turned away by Belorussians as a US citizen makes much more sense.
This is why you shouldn't rely on Timatic for overland travel. But Belarus border rules are really messy anyway. E.g. you can't go from Belarus to Russia overland, unless you're a citizen of either of them.
This is one of those cases where making a mistake is a big enough deal that it's worth paying for information that is known to be correct, rather than relying on a free service that may or may not be up to date.
who are the people who will check visalist and go "ok cool, time to leave - where's my passport?"
anyone travelling internationally checks with the embassy first right? or is there some unspoken expectation that americans/europeans live with during travels about visa on arrival that i don't think about in the same way?
Just shows if i need visa or not after filling all that information. Visalist has this in just one click along with document checklist, official website, visa applicaiton.
What is the advantage of that over just using the official website in the first place? It seems like you'd need to do that even if you used Visalist, so you might as well skip the middleman and just go straight to the reliable information.
It's not always as easy, as each country, and sometimes each embassy has their own structure on their respective website. This service has a lot of merit, especially if used as directory to links of the original source of information. Try finding out whether a Bangladeshi citizen traveling to Saudi Arabia can travel without visa, with visa, with visa on arrival or not at all from a google search.
Wikipedia doesnt have filters and sorting based on visa category or region / sub regions or even the maps where you can visaualize all the countries with different visa requirements. Also it deosnt have the links to official websites, visa application link , fee links and document checklist. Visalist tries has all this.
The information in the site should be used as a guide only. You are advised to contact your local official mission/consulate/embassy and ensure you have the latest information.
Nice looking site. As others have pointed out, it's important to be 100% credible so that people can trust that the results are correct and up-to-date. The overall look of the site is consistent with this, but having "by 1HaKr" in the lower right would be a red flag for some folks who think of "hackers" as exclusively black hat.
It would help the site's credibility if you linked to authoritative source documents showing that you do/don't need a visa for a particular country, so that folks can trust that your third-party site is correct.
It would also be handy if you could include requirements related to international driver's license, IMO.
Lastly, the button "LETS GO!" needs an apostrophe.
There's a lot of basic grammar issues in the copy, which is killer for a domain where credibility is everything. I could list specifics but honestly you just need to get a native English speaker to go over the whole thing.
I too have noticed grammatically incorrect sentences like "The xxx passport holders can visit nnn countries with different visa". No fault on the author's part, who's probably not a native English speaker, but it's definitely an area for improvement.
This is super useful feedback. I will change my name there. There are already links to official government websites.
About driving, license, i will add that. Also thanks for pointing out the typo.
Also, the visa-free and e-visa on arrival should be of different color. If anything else, e-visa should be closer to yellow since it is still a visa, albeit applied online.
Visa-free countries should have its own distinctive color.
I suggest putting the source of information more prominently, and adding links to each piece of information. Especially in more tricky situations, e.g. a Bangladeshi traveling to Israel, it is much more helpful if the additionally mentioned Tip of "Confirmation from Israeli government required before visa is issued" would contain a link at least to the wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh%E2%80%93Israel_rela...
Similarly, I am wondering how to deal with unofficial or temporary information, e.g. Saudi Arabia did not issue visas to Bangladeshi/Pakistani/Nepalese travelers for a while two years ago, without any reason stated or any official information as to why. Similarly there are restrictions which would be great to be included, e.g. an "unaccompanied" female traveler with a muslim sounding name may not receive a visa to Iran, again, without official documentation.
Then there are cases in which a US-visa with at least one entry stamp enables you to travel visa-free (e.g. Georgia) or makes you eligible for visa-on-arrival, similarly e.g. the coverage of an existing Schengen-visa would be great to show you eligibility across the map.
Would you care to put your source into Gitlab.com or Github.com or similar, to enable pull requests from travelers who run into updated information? That would make this a great, constantly updated source of information!
Thanks, nice tool, bookmarked. I'll second that "give an authoritative basis" advice.
Two minor items that struck me:
- Country code, I'd suggest going with alpha2 from iso 3166, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 (Portugal is usually .pt/PT =alpha2 , sometimes POR, PRT=alpha3 is kind of rare)
- Something strange about the sorting of the left column, mine goes U V V V A by country initial on (default) "visa type" ...
I find many of the critical comments to be shortsighted, especially those talking about trust/credibility. Do people really believe folks will check this site then run over to book an international ticket straight after?
This is an awesome site to get a general idea where I (or my friends & family) can and can’t travel with and without extra work. It has a nice interface, a good collection of information, and is easier to browse than, say, Wikipedia on mobile.
If I’m actually interested in locking down and going on a trip to somewhere where I may possibly need a visa, of course I’ll do additional due diligence with the embassy, which the site often helpfully links.
“1HaKr in the corner reminds people of hackers and may turn people away.” Really?
I have a completely evidence-free theory that, over time, the average sentiment score of comments on HN has gone down.
Maybe I'm succumbing to bias with this theory (hello Eternal September), but it seems like all I read on "Show HN" anymore is negativity and dismissiveness.
I really ought to try and do the analysis. I think it wouldn't be hard (HN is very good about keeping historical data, and sentiment analysis looks as easy as importing a library and passing it a dataset), just time consuming.
To me, HN is a place where ideas are workshopped. If one is looking for accolades, Reddit might be a better forum.
I don't think I have any trouble with critical sentiments as long as they are correctly critical. Of course, too often they are not because some HN folks have an ax to grind, and to make things worse, they are misinformed because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing (pseudointellectuals). [1]
But at the same time, if people are not critically examining ideas, that almost defeats the purpose of this place. I've seen some really bad and incorrect ideas on Show HN that are given a pass due to lack of expertise and discernment on the commenters' parts.
Criticism, when done with civility with the intention to build up rather than tear down, can be a wonderful thing.
Also, despite its purported negativity, people still dip their toe in the comments sections from time to time, holding out hope for finding the one or two gems. For all its flaws, there's no other general forum on the Internet (that I know of) that congregates this level of intellectual ability mixed with technical expertise. (specialized forums notwithstanding)
The comments on HN tend to be so completely out of touch with reality, that it's sometimes hard to separate the wheat from the proverbial chaff.
If the negativity was constructive, I'd be with you, but I don't think it is. It's the incorrect or incomplete application of concepts people pick up in blog posts or half-read books about one person's opinion about how to do a certain thing, represented as gospel.
Regarding your link, I urge you to check the dates those comments were posted. You'll find, I theorize, that the number of these quality posts has gone down over time. I believe the "good parts" are fading, getting lost in the increasing noise.
I'm curious, given your feelings, what motivates your (fairly active) participation in the comments section?
Not trying to be snarky, just want to know what people are truly looking for in the comments, because I happen to have a different view of the comments (maybe it's just in the sampling of topics I'm interested in).
Shouting into the void about the void helps me deal with the void's existence.
Honestly, if I were a completely rational actor, I wouldn't comment on HN.
Besides, I think you'd find the level of comments on HN to be no better than what's on Reddit or Stack Overflow or Quora or Slashdot or Twitter or Facebook or even Google+.
I think I see where you're coming from. Humans aren't always rational.
I have a different view. I think the quality of a subset of comments here are appreciably better in some respects than many of the sites you listed. Of course there are contrarian, misinformed pseudointellects, but at the same time, one also gets to hear the unvarnished thoughts of lead developers of specific products (e.g. Timescale, Azure services, D programming language, etc.). I know of no other forum where this is true.
Maybe my mind is used to filtering out stuff I don't care about, so most of the cruft and negativity doesn't really bother me. I also come from an academic tradition where debate and disagreement (high quality or not) is just part of life. To me, it's just a reflection of the world out there -- all forums have their brand of stupidity. HN's just a different kind of stupid from Reddit, and I'm ok with all kinds of stupid as long as there are still good bits that edify me, which is why I keep coming back.
Site(s) like StackOverflow and certain StackExchanges have higher quality exchanges on particular topics, but they aren't designed for discussion. They are heavily constrained Q&A sites. The bar of acceptability is much higher (questions get closed all the time), but the topics also more or less have verifiable answers, which makes it easy to achieve "quality"; this is not true of a general purpose discussion forum. Jeff Atwood (StackOverflow's founder) was interviewed on the MIT AI podcast recently about this, and his answers on how to arrive at high quality online communities were insightful.
Finally, and this is my opinion, the way to counter incorrect and unhelpful discussions isn't to withdraw but to redirect the discussion in more helpful directions by providing correct information and a counterargument. HN is just the aggregate of people who visit it -- the same people have to self-govern it to some extent.
The problem with this attitude is that it's, in a word, superior. Superior attitudes are rarely productive.
I dislike very strongly those communities who encourage their members to put themselves above others, and I see that as more harmful than any inherent value the community might provide.
If HN were really superior, people wouldn't have to keep telling me it's so, yet that's all I am told when this topic comes up. Why isn't it self-evident?
A large portion of my time on HN (nearly 10 years, blame XKCD) has been devoted to this topic specifically, and no one has yet shown me the merits of this site to a degree that it outweighs the arrogance its members have shown over and over.
I've very recently started writing my thoughts out more long form, maybe I'll dedicate a post to this topic. Otherwise, I am probably done talking about it, as dang tends to get upset with me when I go on like this.
I'm not sure I agree, but I too will stop here too except to say that this whole exchange is a bit meta in that it seems to reflect the content and attitudes it is opposing. (I'm not excluding myself from this--I'm equally culpable)
I personally would never use a website like this because I am not going to trust my precious travel plans and legal standing in another country to a non-authoritative website.
For my personal comfort, the problem to be solved is officially recognized information presented in a convenient way.
In fact, I have noticed that websites like this tend to add to my confusion when they contradict the official forms.
But if you come from a place with fickle travel relationships to other countries, then I could see the skepticism
For me, an American, this is just a better presented version of something I dont really have to care about it, except to briefly skim and see if I need to do something extra for some pointless automatic bureaucratic reason that doesnt really have any human discretion on whether I can enter a country or not
Actually the information is from the official website, infact in the details page you can find link to the offical website. What i'm trying to do here is simplify the visa requirements for everyone.
I disagree with the GP comment, something like this is exactly what I needed about a month ago, due to possibly needing political asylum. Speaking of which, I'll take the time to suggest you, if you can, to add information whether a given country is a signatory of the 1967 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Thank you for the great work!
I was also concerned about a similar issue so I selected my home country and a random visiting country that required a visa. The site indicates the source is wikipedia
No the information claims to be sourced from Wikipedia. On comparing the information with the official website, there are numerous places where the information on this website is incomplete or inaccurate.
For example, the visa requirements for India->Italy show no mention of photocopies of US, UK and Schengen visa pages. The requirements do not provide explicit specifications for the photograph (white background). There is no mention of a travel itinerary including a list of other countries that one is intending to visit, which is also a requirement.
The bottom line is that the information is of poor quality by virtue of not being accurate, and nobody takes responsibility for it, which makes it very risky to use when making important plans.
The cover letter #10 in the document checklist is the itinerary
I found this very useful website to check visa requirements for different countries https://visalist.io/italy/visa-requirements/india
This is my MVP, I plan to add photo details soon.
The Wikipedia page is subtly wrong you get a "visa on arrival", not "visa not required". There are some important details left out too; for example one of the conditions for getting the visa is that you have booked flights out of New Zealand. I've heard stories of people not realizing this and having to book flights on the spot :-(
You can get a 9 month visa quite easily, but you need to apply for it (and then you can enter without flights out of the country).
There are probably many more pages where such details (or even more important details) are lacking; I just chose this one as I recently moved to New Zealand so I know a thing or two about the Visa requirements there.
It might be useful for a quick "hm, I'd like to go somewhere, what are my options?", but I would always check the immigration website for these kinds of requirements/details. And frankly, I don't see what this website adds over Wikipedia.
TBH in most cases you're formally required to have an onward ticket and a proof of accommodation, even if you can enter visa-free. OTOH in many cases nobody bothers to ask for it.
So the official website, visa application link, fees and document checklist are not available on Wikipedia. VisaList tries to aggregate all this info and show it in a simple and useful manner.
It includes all these things. Perhaps other countries are less helpful, but certainly in these cases VisaLink isn't really adding anything in its current state.
Also, "You do not need a chip & PIN card to use an ATM — your standard magnetic card will work fine" is wrong for the Netherlands, as magnetic cards were phased out years ago. They're not accepted anywhere AFAIK.
Getting good data on "the entire world" as you're trying to do here is hard, and requires real experts. Just copying/scraping Wikipedia is frankly not a good place to start, actually investing money and paying domain experts is.
I know it sucks to have people be critical about something you spent a lot of time building, and maybe one day your website will have better data, and I wish you the best of luck with, but right now I don't see how it's adding value.
How do you handle some of the more obscure cases? For example, citizens of some countries, including the US, can do a short, visa-free stay in China if they’re transiting through the major airports (https://www.travelchinaguide.com/embassy/visa/transit.htm).
I saw Beijing this way coming back to SF from Taiwan. It was a pain to find all the details about how to apply, and a site like this could help people find out about such opportunities. e.g., you could match trip itinieraries to interesting stopovers.
Another case you could add is for citizens of country A but resident of Country B. For e.g. Indian citizen residing in US or has valid US Visa gets Visa free travel to Mexico and other countries.
The title on the front page says "Find countries to travel to" but then I'm suppose to specify my "home country", which I find just _slightly_ counter-intuitive. I'd suggest to change it up a bit so that I can specify home country and, optionally, a destination I have in mind. Then I'd get results specific for that country only (including, eg, transit visas). I'd also replace "home country" with "citizenship", since I may have a passport of one country, but live in another (which is fairly common in some parts of EU, for example). Many people also have dual citizenship.
Why not just scrape the info from Wikipedia? It will be a lot easier for you to maintain, you'll have access to more data than you do now, and the information will be a lot more accurate. You can also fetch the latest info once a day (or more often for that matter) without worrying about your IP being blacklisted. Even if you had a million active users then I doubt you'd end up with more accurate and up-to-date info than what you can find on Wikipedia.
To me it also seems very misleading when countries that only allow 15-30 days visa-free entry are being listed as visa free. I like the layout of the website, but I personally can't see myself using it as long as I still need to visit Wikipedia for accurate information with regard to visa free duration.
The color coding between the two most popular categories could stand to be more distinct. Discerning between aqua and turquoise is harder than I thought it would be.
People with felony convictions in their home country may also be refused entry to some visa-free countries and not others, and while it's a rat's nest of exceptions and procedures to sift through, it would make this site far more interesting and useful to show which visa-free countries will still deny entry.
Nice site. This isn't the first visa site like it i've seen, but they all focus on travel visas it seems. I suppose that's the low-hanging fruit.
What would be interesting to see are work visas, entrepreneur/freelance visas, working holiday visas, and so on. Obviously a much more complicated ask but that is what I have not yet seen from a site.
Main reason being this: If you want to travel somewhere you can pretty much go on government websites (either yours or theirs) and see what the visa requirements are. If you're looking to relocate to another country but perhaps don't have a good idea where you want to (or can) relocate to or how, it can be a steep hill to climb. Having something with a bit of a hint as to where to start looking would be nice for people I think.
For some reason I am quite curious about this kind of thing and keep looking up passports I don’t have for countries I won’t visit. I use Wikipedia which is pretty good.
What is missing is all the weird non visitor visas. For instance Canadians might work in the US on a TN visa or Australians can work on the UK for a year if they’re under some age (30? 35?)
It’s that sort of thing that would be useful. If Americans can work visa free in Mongolia for up to 6 months, it would be great to know. (I doubt this is the case)
It was a quid-pro-quo for them going to Iraq and Afghanistan wars with us. Seems entirely reasonable to give your closest allies a different set of "rules" in exchange for their help.
Funnily enough, about 5 years ago, I did pretty much the same thing. It turned out to be a right pain to actually find, and keep all the data up to date.
I was planning to build a visa site as well, and I also wanted to fill in the all the visa application forms online [1]. That's actually one of the main reasons that I built FormAPI [2].
I decided to stop working on this visa list / forms idea. I think I could make a bit money from ads (hotels, airlines, etc.), but I can't think of any subscription models, and I personally wouldn't pay any one-time fees just to fill out some forms. I think most people would rather use a pen than enter their credit card details.
It would also be far too much work to organize all of these application forms and stay up to date with visa requirements. I just wanted some passive income and wasn't ready to schlep [3].
But I think it could be done with VC funding and a team of salespeople and immigration experts. You need people calling or emailing embassies, or visiting them in person, and making sure that they know about these filled-in forms and are willing to accept them. I was also thinking that I would eventually build a SaaS service for every embassy, so that people could apply online and track their applications. Could start with filling out the forms, and then eventually digitize the process and cut out the paper. But I was worried about turning into another online visa agency where I was just a middle-man. That's a service business with low margins, and it would be easy to settle into that and get stuck there.
Anyway, it's a huge project, so it's not something I could do by myself. Also trying to sell software to government and immigration agencies is a really bad idea (from personal experience.) But maybe there's an opportunity here, so let me know if anyone is interested in working on that.
The problem with this kind of stuff is how do you keep these up to date. Visa policies change all the time and generally don't get a lot of publicity. There is a reason there are specialist visa agencies like CIBT
My plan is to collect as much data as possible and then build crowdsourcing features so that the community will keep the data up to date. I think that the only way to make #TravelTensionFree
I wanted to start with the basic usecase and validate the idea if it will be useful. Now that i see there are lot of people found it useful, i will try to add these additional usecases aswell. Thanks for the feedback.
Incredibly useful website. I have a few suggestions but please don't take this as negative criticism! I travel a fair bit and having these things would make this website my "one stop shop" for travel needs!
* The ability to export a list of results into CSV or something else that I can import into a spreadsheet. I tend to make travel plans on spreadsheets, and this would be very helpful.
* Scrolling to the left or right makes the colours disappear? I think this may be an OSM limitation but it really confused me.
* Is there a way I can filter on multiple categories? I'd like to look at visa-free and visa-on-arrival in the same map.
* This may be personal preference, but the emoji are really distracting.
* The region filter doesn't seem to influence the subregion filter? If I select "Asia" as a region I assumed the sub-regions list would reflect only the sub-regions of Asia but that doesn't seem to be true
* If I can subscribe to visa status *changes* for my country by email I'd give up my email address immediately. I'd probably be willing to pay money for this if it's accurate :)* The fact that this is non-authoritative doesn't bother me at all. You may want to highlight this a bit more "strongly". Maybe give up some of that priceless above-the-fold real-estate just to save yourself any legal trouble.
* Consider linking to traveldoc.aero as well.
* Several people I know and work/travel with have multiple passports from countries that allow it. Consider allowing the multiple home countries!
I'd be curious to know where you got this data from.
Also note: Many, many countries have a different policy if you are flying in (some kind of e-visa) or if you are driving in, where you need a physical visa in your passport.
Ethiopia is exactly that right now for many passport holders.
A big thumbs up. Very useful. As an Indian citizen, I have traveled close to 50 countries (not including business trips) and Indian citizens, apart from a handful of countries, need visa for most of the world. This site comes in handy.
If possible, consider adding which countries have exemptions for holders of Permanent Residency (Greencard), or an Australian PR and such.
So excruciatingly painful to travel on the Indian passport. I was rejected from visiting my fiancee in France even though I had a UK, Swiss (was not schengen in 2007) and H1b visa on my passport.
Also visa requirements are by the passport you are holding not usually the PR so requirements don't change that much.
I think countries on the border will allow travel, so if you have an Australian PR you might visit New Zealand, a US GC for Mexico or a China residence visa for Honk Kong.
(I am not saying those visas are currently accepted, I am saying they might be)
Really nice. If an eVisa is available for my selection, consider offering me a link so I can sign up direct... and, as an alternative, possibly wrapper a service around this to submit the application process on my behalf (making clear this is a paid/premium service).
I'm not sure if crowdsourced data would work, and I think this probably needs a team of researchers and immigration experts to give people enough confidence (especially if they're going to be paying for something.) Or at least a license to use the Timatic data. I went down this road a while ago and realized that I would probably become either a Timatic competitor, or a visa agency like https://www.visahq.com
Just checked and it isn't accurate for citizens of Pakistan. For instance it says, "visa is required for Israel". Pakistan doesn't recognise Israel therefore they can't even apply for a visa.
The website is accurate - a visa is required- but oversimplifying things. It's certainly possible, but it requires jumping through hoops. Essentially you have to "hop" through a third country.
nice, however this information is not too hard to get myself. Add Dual nationality/ multi-nationality, and that would actually save me time.
(single nationals can just search for any website, whereas dual nationals would want to search for 2 as they have more options, and if they only have to use your website that saves their time!) :)
Given the amount of work needed to maintain this information in useful detail, perhaps a site could ask for $X (maybe less than 10) per lookup for a given nationality to a given country, then use that to have a lawyer or someone keep the data accurate.
While this is super cool, as an Argentinian I show up as visa-free for a bunch of Schengen countries, which while strictly not false it's not super useful: We get 3 out of every 6 months stay, and the list would prob be a lot more useful to people who don't know this if these things were somehow displayed; it's after all not a minor caveat when picking travel destinations
I believe there are few countries in the world where you can stay 3+ months on a visa-free entry no matter what passport you hold. Usually you need a visa to stay longer than that.
There are spelling errors on each page I've looked at so far (eg travel "Iternary").
Personally I'd never trust such a site; I'd rather rely on my own research of visa conditions direct from official sources for the couples of times a year I need such information. If you can somehow increase the trustworthiness of your site, this might change.
Apologies for the typo, corrected it. Currently there are offical website links, visa application link and fee links along with document checklist. You can always cross check with the official site. As next step, i'm planning to add crowdsource validation, so the data is most accurate and upto date.
If you plan to crowdsource information, please make it abundantly clear that the info is crowdsourced, and maybe even make it slightly harder to get! There is a lot of inaccurate information about visas.
Part of the problem is that border agents in most countries have A LOT of discretion in who is not allowed in, even if the laws explicitly say otherwise. To a lesser extent, they also make exceptions in the other direction (I've been granted a visa-on-arrival for a country that did not allow people with my passport to get visas on arrival :).
Folks often mistake their personal experience as "the law", which is often wrong.
Speaking of typos, there’s one on your personal website: https://1hakr.com/ "Currenctly" -> "Currently". Also I’m not a native speaker, but "Find countries to travel" sounds weird to me. Shouldn’t that be "Find countries to travel to"?
This is rather basic -- what if your home country is different than the country you live in? Your flexibility to travel, for example in Europe, is quite different if you have a European ID card even if you are not from there. You still need visas to some countries but not others, depending on both your ID card as well as your home country.
Can you expand on that a bit? I'm a US citizen living in Norway (a member of the EEA but not the EU). I know that I can use the EEA immigration lines at many (but not necessarily all) checkpoints in EEA countries if I present them with my Norwegian residence card at the window.
Are there other travel optimizations, either in-region or elsewhere, that I should look into? Are they all dependent on a residence card, or does a Norwegian driver license or other documentation confer additional rights?
Consider someone from a country with poor passport freedoms. Normally, if they lived in their home country, they'd need visas for lots of places. But now they live in Europe. Thus, the places that require visas depends on:
1) The home country.
2) The destination country.
3) The holding of other residence permits.
That person does not need a visa if they live in Germany and want to travel to Belgium, but they do if they want to visit London. And the only way to know that is by considering all of the above points, not just their home country.
So i collected this manually. My plan is to add crowdsource data, so the data is maintained by the travel community.
No, i'm just a digital nomad, coding his way thrugh life :)
If the data is coming from an official web page, you could make something that notifies you when the web page changes. Then you can check to see if you need to update the requirements.
So except few countries, most of the other countries dont have these sites. Even these sites point to the offical website of the traveling country. More over the visa application link, fee link, document checklist are not present. Visalist tries to aggreate all this information and show it an simple and useful way.
I also spotted what I believe to be inaccurate about Vietnam. I think passport holders of some countries can visit without a visa for up to 14 days, but if you're travelling for longer, visa is required.
Honestly, relying on any such work flow to find something as critical as visa requirements is insane. At least I wouldn't want to rely on some service which failed to detect that some Russian government page updated their web page and considers the page outdated. The page could still exist while incoming links are removed or similar.
I'm not saying this is perfect or it's all you need, but it's something.
To be honest, as someone who's done crowd sourced projects before this entire project sounds .... very difficult.
If it was my project, I'd have worked on these "crowd sourced" elements from the start, not as a "planning to do" - because I think the only way this will work long term is to get those right. And getting them right will be very difficult to do.
Also, I'd link to source material much more prominently. As a reader, I'm not inclined to trust a random unofficial page on the internet - especially on anything as important as Visas - so providing lots of links I can spent 10 minutes following up on to reassure myself would be great.
Oh, and big timestamps showing when a piece of info was last checked/updated.
Is there a way for US/Canadian long term visa holders to check their visa requirements?
E.g. Indian citizens are normally required to get visa for Mexico/Philippines. But with a H1B visa from USA they can travel visa free / visa on arrival.
I checked one combination for which I am fairly aware of the details and I find multiple errors:
USA, visiting China.
It tells me 30 day stay, 90 day visa validity--but down in "tips" it correctly says I would get a 10 year visa. (In practice--I hold a 60 day stay visa, my (China-born) wife has a 90 day stay. These are by no means our first visas, though.)
It also says registration is required within 24 hours--this is the rule for urban areas, in rural ones it's 72 hours. Also, in practice this normally does not matter as the hotel does it for you--you just need to do it yourself if you're not in a hotel.
It also lists financial document requirements that AFIAK are not expected of Americans.
Great job. If you can keep it uptodate, this would be the first stop before travel. One thing that it can be improved is showing transit Visa requirements. Multiple stop flights are cheaper , but transit visa information is hard to gather.
Wonderful feedback. I'm just trying to validate the idea. once there is traction, then i will add more visas. I want to make visalist one stop shop for all visa requirement needs
Selecting USA, many countries are showing "13 to 11 hours ahead" for the time difference. I expect it to be "11 to 13 hours ahead" (numbers of ranges going smaller to larger)
I'm helping with a conference and this would be massively useful... except I need to define there relationship by the destination country, not the origin.
Can this show me all of the conditions for people wanting to visit a country?
Good job! Nice UI.
But little but very important note for people from those countries: Add region called "Central Europe". Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Hungarians... they hate being marked as eastern europeans ;)
As an American who visited all those countries and conversed with multiple citizens from each of those countries, they do remind you of the "Central Europe" thing..
However, they don't understand that for Americans, "Eastern Europe" isn't geographic; it's geopolitical... essentially, Europe east of the former Berlin Wall
There's South America the continent, but for some Spanish people (and possibly other peoples), "South America" is everything south of America (starting with Mexico)
I am from México, and came here to comment because the posted website says "Mexico is part of Central America", and well, No. México is definitely, absolutely, unequivocally in North America.
Which Spanish people? No one in Latin America(or for that matter in Spain) use your weird definition for South America.For classifying America or the Americas there are 2 different models: the 2 continent model (that Anglo people use among others) and the 1 continent model that we use in Latin America. In neither of those 2 models Mexico is considered a part of South America.
But that's it! We hate to be connected with former Soviet eastern block. Therefore it's even more important for us to be considered and called Central Europe ;)
Over this project - while interesting and excellently executed - I use passportindex.org [0].
I can't validate its sources directly, but its backed by Arton Capital, which after a few minutes of research seems to have a pretty decent reputation in this field.
Its also been validated by some respectable sources: WSJ, CNN, MSN, WaPo, HuffPo, and more [1].
Good work! Just something I reacted to as a Swede is that the Åland Islands, the Faroe Islands and Greenland are listed as separate countries. Citizens of these areas hold Finnish or Danish passports respectively.
Not sure about the Åland Islands, but at least Faroe and Greenland have a different visa regime than Denmark (they are both not in Schengen. Also Danish citizen residing e.g. in the Faroe are not seen as Schengen citizen, or something like that).
Generally a hard edge case are all those autonomous or semiautonomous territories. Like all the islands of UK and France (some French territories are part of the EU, some are not). It's often a lot harder to get info on the visa requirements for those.
One oddness - home country is AU, attempting to determine status for Croatia. On the map it comes up as visa-free. Filtering 'croatia' shows it as visa-free. But even after scrolling all the way to the bottom, Croatia only shows up as as one of the languages spoken in Montenegro and Bosnia & Herzegovina. Might be a browser artefact - I'm on Chrome - and/or after-effect of page load, but it's not ideal. (It's always faster to type ctrl-f than to mouse-navigate to on-page search / filter dialogs.)
Feature request: Show visa-free destinations of intersection of two or more citizenships: Eg French and Ukrainian couple can only travel visa-free to a few places together. Which are these places?
I'd suggest for when you're on the page that shows you the list of countries -> fix everything besides the list, so when you scroll down all the menus and context stay in view.
I'm in Germany and France shows up as 11 to 11 hours behind me. That's not quite right, just wanted to let you know that something about the time differences seems fishy.
Impressive. I tested it for a case where Visa was required except for some edge case. And indeed the exception (which applies to me) was shown prominently in a "tips" card.
Missing some of the more complex edge cases. Holding permanent residency in Canada allows access to more countries. Cuba for example:
"However, they are eligible to travel to Cuba with a tourist card if they also hold a valid visa or permanent residence permit issued by Canada, the United States or an EU member state."
You won't know for sure, however, until you check with an official Government source. I don't know what the utility of a 3rd party version of this is. Usually people only go to a limited set of countries on every trip, so it's not a big burden to go.
And I found an error on the first country I checked USA -> Belarus.
You don't need a Visa only if you're entering through the Airport and staying less than 5 days. If you're crossing the border from Lithuania by car, you do need one.
Sorry, but this is incorrect. The European Travel Information and Authorisation System has not even been developed yet, much less deployed. It will only come online in 2021. Until then, Schengen is visa-free for Canadians and Americans.
>On July 5th, the European Parliament has given its final agreement to implement the European Travel Information and Authorisation System, ETIAS. European authorities have decided to establish the electronic visa waiver system in the year 2021 to improve security across the Schengen Area.
Suggestion: The green colours picked for "visa free" and "visa on arrival" is very close. I would recommend that you change the colours to be more obviously different.
I personally found it a bit difficult to tell the difference between green and slightly-darker-green.
Otherwise, very nice apart from the funky scrolling glitching up all over the place.
Well done! I like it as a potential way to brainstorm travel.
However I would not use it as a definitive resource simply because there is no authoritative central source for the data, and the official sources are sometimes very messy (I assume you're scraping consular websites to keep current).
Feature suggestion: show the name of the country when hovering on the map.
So basically for every person, its a list of countries they can travel based on their home country, hence the name. But yes it can be called that aswell!
Checked for my home country (Switzerland), and it doesn't seem to be correct - travel to Canada requires an eTA, but the site lists Canada as being visa free. Could get you in for an unpleasant surprise when your airline won't let you board (they check for eTA at check-in).
https://www.iatatravelcentre.com is my goto when it comes to visas. Not sure though if they provide this data over an API. and I heard that this is what airlines usually use.
Cool! If I were more bored, I'd be interested to see how correlated these two data points are: GDP per capita, number of countries that allow no visa or visa on arrival
Just playing with the input, I suspect there would be a strong correlation.
The most helpful addition to this site would be a list of biometrics that the country collects. Eg: fingerprints, photo on arrival, etc... That way we can avoid the fascist, fingerprint hoarding countries!
Perhaps you could add relevant links, for example where a user can apply for an e-Visa. Or addresses of consulates, etc. Example visa application letters, and stuff like that.
Countries usually don't know which passports you have (If you enter for the first time and they don't have some kind of data-sharing agreement) so you'd just enter with the one that's easier not by showing all of yours.
I don't recall every being asked about other nationalities. Countries will ask if you have previously entered under a different name but presumably you are using the same name world wide.
If you have multiple passports you can just use whichever one gets you through immigration the fasted. some caveats:
1) if you have a passport from the country you are entering/leaving they want you to use it ie if you have a US passport you should use it when entering or leaving the US. If you then arrive in the UK and have a UK passport you should use your UK passport at the UK end of your flight.
2) if you entered a country with passport A use that same passport to leave. If you don't they wont automatically match up your entry and departure. On one hand you will have appeared to have overstayed your visa, on the other you are now exiting the country with no record of you having entered. At a minimum there will be questions and your just trying to just get through immigration painlessly.
Sometimes they do. Sometimes, however, they work in the opposite way - a person who would otherwise be able to get in Dubai without a visa, should probably not even attempt to do so if he has an israeli citizenship. Same for Ukraine and male russian citizens, and probably other interesting points around the globe as well.
It's something many of us don't really think about, but it ends up being quite convenient.
For example, citizens of most countries cannot book a multi-leg trip (not single booking) without a visa, simply because that would require going through passport control to board the next leg.
I spent the last 6 months trying to build [Visalist](https://visalist.io). Now your quest for tension free visa requirements research is over.
Here's why I made this web app: A year back I became a digital nomad and started traveling. I wanted to visit all the countries that I fancied. Soon I realized that you need a visa to most of these countries, few have VOA(Visa on Arrival) and for others, you have to get it through their embassy in your home country(in my case India). So now I wanted to see the countries I could go without waiting for 3 weeks to get a visa, did some research. After few blogs and websites finally got the list. Traveled to a new country. After few months I wanted to go to another country. I had to do the same search, couldn't find the old one, found a new site which had more countries offering VOA. One of my friends told me that when he researching for Vietnam visa, he found almost 10 websites with .gov and it was really confusing. Many blogs don't have links to official websites of embassies.
To summarize the problems:
* No aggregated info of visa related info shown in a useful way.
* Most of the existing blogs and website has very less info and are usually outdated.
* Lot of research is needed even to go to a single country and this needs to be done every single time.
* Difficult to find the official website and data on many websites is outdated.
* Pay more than required money to visa agent's
So I took the matter into my own hands and decided to aggregate this info, organize and present it in a useful way to the user and so VisaList was born. While I was talking to my friends about this, I realized many people wanted something similar from a long time. So what this has is
* A simple way to find the basic requirements for all the countries you want to travel
* Simplified visa requirements like visa-free, visa on arrival, visa not required, evisa, visa required and visa refused (Yes! For North Korea)
* A simple map color-coded with visa requirements across the world so you can easily see which countries around you can easily travel to
* Visa Requirement details like duration, documents checklist and other requirements for the stay
* Which is the official website for that information
I coded, designed and built Visa List using VueJS with NuxtJS for the frontend, MySQL for backend using Golang. I was originally an android developer and learned these just to build Visa List.
I believe every person who wants to explore the world around them and would have faced the problem I faced, so could find value in what I have built. So I would love to know what you think of this and would be more than happy to hear your suggestions and feature requests. Let me know what you want to be added or removed or do I need to build something entirely!
Nice one! It'd be really cool to be able to sort by Visa length as well. That'd be a handy feature for digital nomads.
You could solve any issues with info being out of date by sourcing from the community, allowing people to flag or comment on specific pages.
Also, it's useful in the nomad community to know how easy it is to do visa runs etc as well, so that's perhaps some insider info - maybe you could put this behind a paywall.
Wikipedia does crowdsource this info fairly effectively though, sample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Indian_c...