[kdheiwns]

I wish countries would stop trying to be cute with names like ESTA, KETA, ETA, etc and call it what it is: an evisa. These countries lie and say "don't worry bro you don't need a visa bro. Just ride that plane bro. it's free bro.", then you find out there's some government portal that runs 9-5 local time five days a week (holidays off) and requires a $X fee every submission with a chance of failing for a random reason. And it can take days for a response to come.

And people will say "it's not a visa bro. You just need to upload your photo, personal info, pay a fee, and they'll get back to you in a few days to tell you whether you're allowed in." Indonesia and India have identical processes with 5 minute turnaround times. Know what they call them? E-Visas. And if you're not eligible for an evisa, you go get a normal one.

It's tedious because you search for whether a country needs a visa, and results will say "nope", but it turns out if you're from specific nationalities that get visa free travel (but not all), you don't need a visa, but you need some random application for something named with a random combination of letters. And if you don't know that specific name, a shallow search might say you're fine.

Just quit the BS. Call it an evisa. And countries that call their process evisas handle them cheaper, faster, and more easily than ESTA or whatever other scam/visa workaround other countries have.

I've never been rejected yet, but it's a pain in the ass needing to do a deep search, thinking I'm fine since no visa is required, then finding out 3 days before my flight while browsing travel forums there is some secret application I need to submit and their webpage is slow and buggy as hell.

[drstewart]

It's the sneaky death of visa-free travel, unfortunately.