Show HN: Visalist – Find visa requirements for countries around the world
visalist.io
visalist.io
Wikipedia does crowdsource this info fairly effectively though, sample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Indian_c...
Edit. I keep forgetting that Ukraine now does have visa free travel with Schengen states.
I think all such sites are just useful for giving ideas of where to go on holiday or hold a business meeting.
Once the idea progresses, it's necessary to check with embassies or government websites on the current situation.
https://visalist.io/algeria/visa-requirements/united-states-...
Tiamatic. Free for all, I guess maybe consider United for your travel needs if you find it useful.
But perhaps you could look into using it as an API backend to gather the data for your site.
anyone travelling internationally checks with the embassy first right? or is there some unspoken expectation that americans/europeans live with during travels about visa on arrival that i don't think about in the same way?
https://www.skyteam.com/en/flights-and-destinations/visa-and...
https://www.iatatravelcentre.com/passport-visa-health-travel...
https://www.koreanair.com/global/en/traveling/airport-check-...
The information in the site should be used as a guide only. You are advised to contact your local official mission/consulate/embassy and ensure you have the latest information.It would help the site's credibility if you linked to authoritative source documents showing that you do/don't need a visa for a particular country, so that folks can trust that your third-party site is correct.
It would also be handy if you could include requirements related to international driver's license, IMO.
Lastly, the button "LETS GO!" needs an apostrophe.
Two minor items that struck me:
- Country code, I'd suggest going with alpha2 from iso 3166, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 (Portugal is usually .pt/PT =alpha2 , sometimes POR, PRT=alpha3 is kind of rare)
- Something strange about the sorting of the left column, mine goes U V V V A by country initial on (default) "visa type" ...
Visa-free countries should have its own distinctive color.
Similarly, I am wondering how to deal with unofficial or temporary information, e.g. Saudi Arabia did not issue visas to Bangladeshi/Pakistani/Nepalese travelers for a while two years ago, without any reason stated or any official information as to why. Similarly there are restrictions which would be great to be included, e.g. an "unaccompanied" female traveler with a muslim sounding name may not receive a visa to Iran, again, without official documentation.
Then there are cases in which a US-visa with at least one entry stamp enables you to travel visa-free (e.g. Georgia) or makes you eligible for visa-on-arrival, similarly e.g. the coverage of an existing Schengen-visa would be great to show you eligibility across the map.
Would you care to put your source into Gitlab.com or Github.com or similar, to enable pull requests from travelers who run into updated information? That would make this a great, constantly updated source of information!
This is an awesome site to get a general idea where I (or my friends & family) can and can’t travel with and without extra work. It has a nice interface, a good collection of information, and is easier to browse than, say, Wikipedia on mobile.
If I’m actually interested in locking down and going on a trip to somewhere where I may possibly need a visa, of course I’ll do additional due diligence with the embassy, which the site often helpfully links.
“1HaKr in the corner reminds people of hackers and may turn people away.” Really?
Maybe I'm succumbing to bias with this theory (hello Eternal September), but it seems like all I read on "Show HN" anymore is negativity and dismissiveness.
I really ought to try and do the analysis. I think it wouldn't be hard (HN is very good about keeping historical data, and sentiment analysis looks as easy as importing a library and passing it a dataset), just time consuming.
To me, HN is a place where ideas are workshopped. If one is looking for accolades, Reddit might be a better forum.
I don't think I have any trouble with critical sentiments as long as they are correctly critical. Of course, too often they are not because some HN folks have an ax to grind, and to make things worse, they are misinformed because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing (pseudointellectuals). [1]
But at the same time, if people are not critically examining ideas, that almost defeats the purpose of this place. I've seen some really bad and incorrect ideas on Show HN that are given a pass due to lack of expertise and discernment on the commenters' parts.
Criticism, when done with civility with the intention to build up rather than tear down, can be a wonderful thing.
Also, despite its purported negativity, people still dip their toe in the comments sections from time to time, holding out hope for finding the one or two gems. For all its flaws, there's no other general forum on the Internet (that I know of) that congregates this level of intellectual ability mixed with technical expertise. (specialized forums notwithstanding)
If the negativity was constructive, I'd be with you, but I don't think it is. It's the incorrect or incomplete application of concepts people pick up in blog posts or half-read books about one person's opinion about how to do a certain thing, represented as gospel.
Regarding your link, I urge you to check the dates those comments were posted. You'll find, I theorize, that the number of these quality posts has gone down over time. I believe the "good parts" are fading, getting lost in the increasing noise.
Not trying to be snarky, just want to know what people are truly looking for in the comments, because I happen to have a different view of the comments (maybe it's just in the sampling of topics I'm interested in).
Honestly, if I were a completely rational actor, I wouldn't comment on HN.
Besides, I think you'd find the level of comments on HN to be no better than what's on Reddit or Stack Overflow or Quora or Slashdot or Twitter or Facebook or even Google+.
I have a different view. I think the quality of a subset of comments here are appreciably better in some respects than many of the sites you listed. Of course there are contrarian, misinformed pseudointellects, but at the same time, one also gets to hear the unvarnished thoughts of lead developers of specific products (e.g. Timescale, Azure services, D programming language, etc.). I know of no other forum where this is true.
Maybe my mind is used to filtering out stuff I don't care about, so most of the cruft and negativity doesn't really bother me. I also come from an academic tradition where debate and disagreement (high quality or not) is just part of life. To me, it's just a reflection of the world out there -- all forums have their brand of stupidity. HN's just a different kind of stupid from Reddit, and I'm ok with all kinds of stupid as long as there are still good bits that edify me, which is why I keep coming back.
Site(s) like StackOverflow and certain StackExchanges have higher quality exchanges on particular topics, but they aren't designed for discussion. They are heavily constrained Q&A sites. The bar of acceptability is much higher (questions get closed all the time), but the topics also more or less have verifiable answers, which makes it easy to achieve "quality"; this is not true of a general purpose discussion forum. Jeff Atwood (StackOverflow's founder) was interviewed on the MIT AI podcast recently about this, and his answers on how to arrive at high quality online communities were insightful.
Finally, and this is my opinion, the way to counter incorrect and unhelpful discussions isn't to withdraw but to redirect the discussion in more helpful directions by providing correct information and a counterargument. HN is just the aggregate of people who visit it -- the same people have to self-govern it to some extent.
I dislike very strongly those communities who encourage their members to put themselves above others, and I see that as more harmful than any inherent value the community might provide.
If HN were really superior, people wouldn't have to keep telling me it's so, yet that's all I am told when this topic comes up. Why isn't it self-evident?
A large portion of my time on HN (nearly 10 years, blame XKCD) has been devoted to this topic specifically, and no one has yet shown me the merits of this site to a degree that it outweighs the arrogance its members have shown over and over.
I've very recently started writing my thoughts out more long form, maybe I'll dedicate a post to this topic. Otherwise, I am probably done talking about it, as dang tends to get upset with me when I go on like this.
For my personal comfort, the problem to be solved is officially recognized information presented in a convenient way.
In fact, I have noticed that websites like this tend to add to my confusion when they contradict the official forms.
https://visalist.io/central-african-republic/visa-requiremen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Canadian...
Results for USA citizens is similar (citing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_American...) while the presentation is different the source isn't exactly official.
For example, the visa requirements for India->Italy show no mention of photocopies of US, UK and Schengen visa pages. The requirements do not provide explicit specifications for the photograph (white background). There is no mention of a travel itinerary including a list of other countries that one is intending to visit, which is also a requirement.
The bottom line is that the information is of poor quality by virtue of not being accurate, and nobody takes responsibility for it, which makes it very risky to use when making important plans.
The Wikipedia page is subtly wrong you get a "visa on arrival", not "visa not required". There are some important details left out too; for example one of the conditions for getting the visa is that you have booked flights out of New Zealand. I've heard stories of people not realizing this and having to book flights on the spot :-(
You can get a 9 month visa quite easily, but you need to apply for it (and then you can enter without flights out of the country).
There are probably many more pages where such details (or even more important details) are lacking; I just chose this one as I recently moved to New Zealand so I know a thing or two about the Visa requirements there.
It might be useful for a quick "hm, I'd like to go somewhere, what are my options?", but I would always check the immigration website for these kinds of requirements/details. And frankly, I don't see what this website adds over Wikipedia.
The New Zealand visa website is pretty good, as is the one from the Netherlands: https://www.immigration.govt.nz/new-zealand-visas/ and https://www.netherlandsandyou.nl/travel-and-residence
It includes all these things. Perhaps other countries are less helpful, but certainly in these cases VisaLink isn't really adding anything in its current state.
Also, "You do not need a chip & PIN card to use an ATM — your standard magnetic card will work fine" is wrong for the Netherlands, as magnetic cards were phased out years ago. They're not accepted anywhere AFAIK.
Getting good data on "the entire world" as you're trying to do here is hard, and requires real experts. Just copying/scraping Wikipedia is frankly not a good place to start, actually investing money and paying domain experts is.
I know it sucks to have people be critical about something you spent a lot of time building, and maybe one day your website will have better data, and I wish you the best of luck with, but right now I don't see how it's adding value.
Sorry :-(
But if you come from a place with fickle travel relationships to other countries, then I could see the skepticism
For me, an American, this is just a better presented version of something I dont really have to care about it, except to briefly skim and see if I need to do something extra for some pointless automatic bureaucratic reason that doesnt really have any human discretion on whether I can enter a country or not
I saw Beijing this way coming back to SF from Taiwan. It was a pain to find all the details about how to apply, and a site like this could help people find out about such opportunities. e.g., you could match trip itinieraries to interesting stopovers.
This is what industry professionals use to check if you are eligible to board a flight.
With visa requirements there are a lot of details involved, it's not as simple as nationality -> visa requirements mapping.
Some feedback based on first impression:
The title on the front page says "Find countries to travel to" but then I'm suppose to specify my "home country", which I find just _slightly_ counter-intuitive. I'd suggest to change it up a bit so that I can specify home country and, optionally, a destination I have in mind. Then I'd get results specific for that country only (including, eg, transit visas). I'd also replace "home country" with "citizenship", since I may have a passport of one country, but live in another (which is fairly common in some parts of EU, for example). Many people also have dual citizenship.
To me it also seems very misleading when countries that only allow 15-30 days visa-free entry are being listed as visa free. I like the layout of the website, but I personally can't see myself using it as long as I still need to visit Wikipedia for accurate information with regard to visa free duration.
But great job with the app, regardless!
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.
What would be interesting to see are work visas, entrepreneur/freelance visas, working holiday visas, and so on. Obviously a much more complicated ask but that is what I have not yet seen from a site.
Main reason being this: If you want to travel somewhere you can pretty much go on government websites (either yours or theirs) and see what the visa requirements are. If you're looking to relocate to another country but perhaps don't have a good idea where you want to (or can) relocate to or how, it can be a steep hill to climb. Having something with a bit of a hint as to where to start looking would be nice for people I think.
I like it a lot because it lets you compare passports, which helps a bunch when planning travels/moves with someone else.
Edit: Ah yes, https://passportindex.org also lets you do that, I remember using it, it's probably the most featureful of the lot.
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)
(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.
Also, it's missing a way to input multiple citizenships.
* The ability to export a list of results into CSV or something else that I can import into a spreadsheet. I tend to make travel plans on spreadsheets, and this would be very helpful.
* Scrolling to the left or right makes the colours disappear? I think this may be an OSM limitation but it really confused me.
* Is there a way I can filter on multiple categories? I'd like to look at visa-free and visa-on-arrival in the same map.
* This may be personal preference, but the emoji are really distracting.
* The region filter doesn't seem to influence the subregion filter? If I select "Asia" as a region I assumed the sub-regions list would reflect only the sub-regions of Asia but that doesn't seem to be true
* If I can subscribe to visa status *changes* for my country by email I'd give up my email address immediately. I'd probably be willing to pay money for this if it's accurate :)* The fact that this is non-authoritative doesn't bother me at all. You may want to highlight this a bit more "strongly". Maybe give up some of that priceless above-the-fold real-estate just to save yourself any legal trouble.
* Consider linking to traveldoc.aero as well.
* Several people I know and work/travel with have multiple passports from countries that allow it. Consider allowing the multiple home countries!1. I understand, there isnt a plan as data keeps changing. i will see what i can do
2. Go it.
3. I'm thinking of adding it.
4 :)
5 Yes, it should. I just wanted to keep it dumb in the begining. Will change that.
6 Interesting
7 I will
8 Yes this is the most requested feature, i will build it soon.
Again thanks a lot for the wonderful feedback.
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.
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)
That was my problem too, and it's why I eventually dropped the idea. Check out my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18643591
I'm not sure if crowdsourced data would work, and I think this probably needs a team of researchers and immigration experts to give people enough confidence (especially if they're going to be paying for something.) Or at least a license to use the Timatic data. I went down this road a while ago and realized that I would probably become either a Timatic competitor, or a visa agency like https://www.visahq.com
> The [country] passport holders can visit 193 countries with different visa
Check Vietnam, for example: https://visalist.io/vietnam/all-visas
I know, I know, why and how is that possible? The ways of the world are strange. I just know Pakistanis who have visitors Israel.
There are a number of accounts on the internet of Pakistani citizens asking Israel for a visa, and receiving one.
(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!) :)
Given the amount of work needed to maintain this information in useful detail, perhaps a site could ask for $X (maybe less than 10) per lookup for a given nationality to a given country, then use that to have a lawyer or someone keep the data accurate.
Personally I'd never trust such a site; I'd rather rely on my own research of visa conditions direct from official sources for the couples of times a year I need such information. If you can somehow increase the trustworthiness of your site, this might change.
Part of the problem is that border agents in most countries have A LOT of discretion in who is not allowed in, even if the laws explicitly say otherwise. To a lesser extent, they also make exceptions in the other direction (I've been granted a visa-on-arrival for a country that did not allow people with my passport to get visas on arrival :).
Folks often mistake their personal experience as "the law", which is often wrong.
Are there other travel optimizations, either in-region or elsewhere, that I should look into? Are they all dependent on a residence card, or does a Norwegian driver license or other documentation confer additional rights?
1) The home country. 2) The destination country. 3) The holding of other residence permits.
That person does not need a visa if they live in Germany and want to travel to Belgium, but they do if they want to visit London. And the only way to know that is by considering all of the above points, not just their home country.
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)?
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!
USA, visiting China.
It tells me 30 day stay, 90 day visa validity--but down in "tips" it correctly says I would get a 10 year visa. (In practice--I hold a 60 day stay visa, my (China-born) wife has a 90 day stay. These are by no means our first visas, though.)
It also says registration is required within 24 hours--this is the rule for urban areas, in rural ones it's 72 hours. Also, in practice this normally does not matter as the hotel does it for you--you just need to do it yourself if you're not in a hotel.
It also lists financial document requirements that AFIAK are not expected of Americans.
Can this show me all of the conditions for people wanting to visit a country?
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 can't validate its sources directly, but its backed by Arton Capital, which after a few minutes of research seems to have a pretty decent reputation in this field.
Its also been validated by some respectable sources: WSJ, CNN, MSN, WaPo, HuffPo, and more [1].
Generally a hard edge case are all those autonomous or semiautonomous territories. Like all the islands of UK and France (some French territories are part of the EU, some are not). It's often a lot harder to get info on the visa requirements for those.
Otherwise well done!
I'd suggest for when you're on the page that shows you the list of countries -> fix everything besides the list, so when you scroll down all the menus and context stay in view.
"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...
And I found an error on the first country I checked USA -> Belarus.
You don't need a Visa only if you're entering through the Airport and staying less than 5 days. If you're crossing the border from Lithuania by car, you do need one.
Example: One can hold Srilankan Passport, but home country now is USA (Perm Residency Greencard)
>On July 5th, the European Parliament has given its final agreement to implement the European Travel Information and Authorisation System, ETIAS. European authorities have decided to establish the electronic visa waiver system in the year 2021 to improve security across the Schengen Area.
https://www.etiasvisa.com/etias-news/how-will-the-etias-syst...
Overall pretty useful site!
I personally found it a bit difficult to tell the difference between green and slightly-darker-green.
Otherwise, very nice apart from the funky scrolling glitching up all over the place.
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.
I am currently not in my home country. This is also my first time using the site. What background information is the site using to identify this?
Just playing with the input, I suspect there would be a strong correlation.
Somewhat concerning to have a mistake of this type on a website like this—or I'm just behind in the news.
<country> part of <sub region>, <region> woth cpaital at <captial>
For example if I put "United Kingdom" as my home country, it says Ireland is 8-6 hours ahead.
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.
For example, citizens of most countries cannot book a multi-leg trip (not single booking) without a visa, simply because that would require going through passport control to board the next leg.
E.g. the limits of ESTA
Here's why I made this web app: A year back I became a digital nomad and started traveling. I wanted to visit all the countries that I fancied. Soon I realized that you need a visa to most of these countries, few have VOA(Visa on Arrival) and for others, you have to get it through their embassy in your home country(in my case India). So now I wanted to see the countries I could go without waiting for 3 weeks to get a visa, did some research. After few blogs and websites finally got the list. Traveled to a new country. After few months I wanted to go to another country. I had to do the same search, couldn't find the old one, found a new site which had more countries offering VOA. One of my friends told me that when he researching for Vietnam visa, he found almost 10 websites with .gov and it was really confusing. Many blogs don't have links to official websites of embassies.
To summarize the problems: * No aggregated info of visa related info shown in a useful way. * Most of the existing blogs and website has very less info and are usually outdated. * Lot of research is needed even to go to a single country and this needs to be done every single time. * Difficult to find the official website and data on many websites is outdated. * Pay more than required money to visa agent's
So I took the matter into my own hands and decided to aggregate this info, organize and present it in a useful way to the user and so VisaList was born. While I was talking to my friends about this, I realized many people wanted something similar from a long time. So what this has is * A simple way to find the basic requirements for all the countries you want to travel * Simplified visa requirements like visa-free, visa on arrival, visa not required, evisa, visa required and visa refused (Yes! For North Korea) * A simple map color-coded with visa requirements across the world so you can easily see which countries around you can easily travel to * Visa Requirement details like duration, documents checklist and other requirements for the stay * Which is the official website for that information
I coded, designed and built Visa List using VueJS with NuxtJS for the frontend, MySQL for backend using Golang. I was originally an android developer and learned these just to build Visa List.
I believe every person who wants to explore the world around them and would have faced the problem I faced, so could find value in what I have built. So I would love to know what you think of this and would be more than happy to hear your suggestions and feature requests. Let me know what you want to be added or removed or do I need to build something entirely!
Thanks
You could solve any issues with info being out of date by sourcing from the community, allowing people to flag or comment on specific pages.
Also, it's useful in the nomad community to know how easy it is to do visa runs etc as well, so that's perhaps some insider info - maybe you could put this behind a paywall.