Visa agencies charges add up
Professional form-fillers claim to take all the hassle out of applying for visas, but it’ll cost.
There’s something larger than a cottage industry quietly fleecing tourists the world over, in my opinion, the socalled ‘‘visa specialists’’.
These professional form-fillers, whether online or on the border, claim to take all the hassle out of applying for an entry visa to a country, but the fees for processing a few bits of paper and maybe a passport-sized photo, often all online and in replicate to the official government channels, are excessive.
The convenience factor lures people to choose these services (which are often named using similar words and jargon to the official government websites. But you’ll still need to fish out photos, supply birthdate details and travel dates so it’s not really worth the high fees to save filling in a few forms.
Once, after a business class flight to Doha, the Qatari border staff met me at my gate, took me to an airport lounge and filled in all my visa and Customs forms for me while I hit up the snack buffet and then waltzed through the border. I realise that tooperfect reality was a one-off.
There was instead a buffet of fees and levies for reader Peter Hagan and his wife June who wrote me to tell of his troubles when contracting out a visa application to an agency that charged him nearly three times the cost of a Cambodia tourist visa as what the embassy would have charged him (and four times the cost of getting in at the border).
He wrote: ‘‘Being naive and inexperienced with visas I went and searched the Internet and found a site which supplies E-visas. I applied and received a charge of US$206 (NZ$285) which I thought was rather expensive but assumed that is what I had to pay. I subsequently learnt that I could have gone to the Embassy and purchased a visa for US$72 for both of us.’’
When Peter complained to the company about the fees, it said all the conditions were explained on its website.
Peter rightly asks ‘‘How can these people justify having a service charge of US$134?’’ The answer to which is that they are a business selling a perceived convenience which has managed to survive because enough tourists support them financially. Let the buyer beware, indeed.
My own Cambodian border confusion almost left me and my travel buddy the victim of theft in 2013. Like Peter and June we too wanted to get into Cambodia with the least time and hassle spent. At the land border crossing point between Thailand and Cambodia before Poi Pet we were approached by what we thought was a well-dressed border patrol worker who said she would take us to a separate checkpoint to analyse our NZ passports and issue visas on arrival.
We must have looked like easilyduped morons and we fell hook, line and sinker as we then boarded her tuktuk to the ‘‘satellite office’’. As she put on her smog-fighting bandana it dawned on us that this was surely not official procedure, no matter how nice her offices appeared.
She asked for cash and passport as soon as we stepped off the tuk-tuk. The border bandit nearly had us, but thankfully my travel buddy’s suspicions were enough to make us grab our bags and trudge back to the growing queue at the border.
Three sweaty hours later we were through and it was not without a $5 mandatory ‘‘tip’’ to the border official – sometimes it seems even the government workers enact their own service fees.
But with passport and wallets intact and on-person it was far better than what might have happened, and like Peter and June concluded, the jewels of the country were worth these unexpected charges along the way.
Visa smarts
Plan ahead, start thinking about necessary visas and documents months out from your trip. Get costs from official sources such as embassy websites. If you want to use a visa agency, investigate and approve of their fees. Online forums have a wealth of anecdotal knowledge but visa requirements are specific to both host and visitors’ home country. Check the requirements of visas issued on arrival, you may need a small passport-sized photograph or US dollars for payment, for example.