As mentioned in my earlier post, the entire visa process is painful. However, you can make it hassle free quite easily. The major hurdles towards this are the following 3 questions:

1. Does the country that I am traveling to require a personal interview for processing a visa application or can I get my visa done through a travel agent?
2. Why does the consulate require confirmed flight tickets? Is it worthwhile to shell out all that money even before I get a visa?
3. How do I get confirmed hotel booking? How do I find good and cheap hotels in a city in a foreign country?

For now, let us assume that you are going to a country which does not require a personal interview. You can find this out by googling for the consulate’s number. Give the consulate a call and someone will be more than happy to tell you whether your presence is required or not at the time of granting a visa. As far as I know, only the US and the EU countries require a personal interview.

1. The first step would be to find a good travel agent in your city. If you are in Bangalore, I would recommend Mr. George at Orion Travels. The travel agency will be responsible for taking your passport along with all supporting documents, to the consulate and submitting it there. It will also be responsible for couriering back your passport to you, once your visa has been granted. Hence the emphasis on a good travel agent.
2. Booking confirmed flight tickets – Ask your travel agent to block your tickets instead of buying them. Once you get your visa, you can either buy these blocked tickets or go online and buy tickets from there. For our Egypt trip we bought out flight tickets from MakeMyTrip . Your flight tickets will constitute 60% of your trip cost so do a lot of research before you buy these.
3. Finally and by far the easiest step is to get confirmed hotel reservations. I discovered HostelWorld two years ago and since then I have been an absolute fan. A lot of the hostels mentioned here are safe, clean and fun. You pay 10% of the amount at the time of booking a hostel and the rest when you finish your stay with them.

With the above 3 things taken care of you can apply for your visa and in all probabilities it will be granted to you. Once you get your visa, you can re-plan your whole trip or not plan it at all depending on your whim! However, the one thing that you must absolutely have are return tickets from your country of travel. I also recommend a 2 day hotel booking in your city of arrival if you don’t know what your itinerary will be once you enter the country – makes life easier at the immigration.

Next post on, what if I want to go to the US or Europe for travel? How do I get my visa then?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 11:57 am and is filed under Travel, Visa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.