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'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.
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on some service which failed to detect that some Russian government page updated their web page and considers the page outdated.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.
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.
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)
Nathaniel. I can see what your saying... Paul`s remark is neat, on thursday I got a top of the range Nissan GT-R: after making $6612 this last four weeks and just a little over ten-k last munth. this is certainly the easiest work Ive had. I started this five months/ago and almost straight away began to make more than $71 per-hour. I work through this website, www.Mesalary.com
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.
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.
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.
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!) :)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
Nathaniel. I can see what your saying... Paul`s remark is neat, on thursday I got a top of the range Nissan GT-R: after making $6612 this last four weeks and just a little over ten-k last munth. this is certainly the easiest work Ive had. I started this five months/ago and almost straight away began to make more than $71 per-hour. I work through this website, www.Mesalary.com
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.
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)
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."
259 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadAlso 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.
How do you ensure that all visa information is up to date? Do you automatically parse visa policy changes on official government web pages?
I made a single spot check (USA -> VNM), and the website seems to conflate e-visa with visa on arrival (they are different for Vietnam).
Lol. That won't work well.
But you could watch for any changes on certain webpages and then flag those webpages to a human for them to check.
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.
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.
To the creator - sorry to be down. Good luck!
visalist.io: "Visa is not required for a certain period, or there is freedom of movement"
https://visalist.io/malaysia/visa-requirements/switzerland
passportindex.org: "visa-free / 90 days"
https://www.passportindex.org/comparebyPassport.php?p1=ch&fl...
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)
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.
I second this. Came here just to say it. Far too similar.
For example I can imagine that a person with only a UK passport can enter the US more freely than a person with both a UK and Iraqi passport.
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.
(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!) :)
If possible, consider adding which countries have exemptions for holders of Permanent Residency (Greencard), or an Australian PR and such.
Also visa requirements are by the passport you are holding not usually the PR so requirements don't change that much.
https://www.visatraveler.com/blog/travel-20-countries-visa-f...
(I am not saying those visas are currently accepted, I am saying they might be)
(Comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5434186 - the actual site has been taken down)
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.
[1] https://www.visaforms.co
[2] https://formapi.io
[3] http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
Also, it's missing a way to input multiple citizenships.
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)
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.
Where did you import all this data from in a structured manner? How do you plan on keeping it up to date?
Are you associated with a commercial enterprise in the space (e.g. travel startup)?
"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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_policy_of_Cuba#Visa_requi...