Easiest way to check if a visa is required
October 4, 2021
Quite often I have heard the question of how to find out quickly whether I need a visa for a country and how to apply for it in advance. Often, more documents are needed because of Covid and it can get confusing. Here is some information on how and where you can quickly find out if you need a visa and what website you can easily get one:
How do I find out if I need a visa or more documents?
Quick review, I’m standing at the Chinese border 10 years ago, want the entry visa and I’m told they need at least a three-day processing time. Stupid! It is very annoying to travel to a country unprepared and to find out at the airport or the border at the latest that you cannot get a visa today. Accordingly, it is first important to check for which country I actually need a visa or other documents.
I used to go to the page of the Foreign Office of my country (Germany). For a few years now, however, I have only used iVisa and occasionally check with the Foreign Office afterwards. The good thing about iVisa is that you can find everything you need quickly and easily, and from pretty much any country of origin to the destination country of your choice. So you save a lot of time! Accordingly, it is easy for me to recommend iVisa. The good thing is that it’s absolutely free!
How do I get the visa or the documents?
A few years ago, it was mainly possible to apply for a visa in writing. In the meantime, almost every country offers the possibility of issuing visas online/digitally. Accordingly, there are now also good websites to make applying for visas easier. So we start again with iVisa, because here you also have the possibility to get the visa for the normal price plus a small fee to iVisa. Somehow iVisa has to be profitable and for me it has definitely been worthwhile so far, absolutely reliable and it worked without any problems! What is fulfilling for me, especially nowadays when banks are mostly trying to present payments in a non-transparent way (see the post to this), is that this company is very transparent with its prices.
However, I must also say that I have mostly only ordered the complicated visas, such as the Russian or Chinese visas via iVisa. For the Russian visa, for example, you need an invitation letter and that’s where the first inconvenience starts, because the invitation letter can only be issued by a licensed travel agency operating in Russia. If you do the whole process with iVisa (who is licenced there), it’s quick and no problem! That has been my experience so far! Ultimately, you can apply for all visas via iVisa. However, I recommend using iVisa first to check and after you see what documents you need, you are spoilt for choice. Of course there are other providers but I have only used iVisa or the embassy websites so far.
Now you can see an example of two screenshots to show you how easy it is to use it:
Looks easy right? Here you can go directly to iVisa
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