Very interesting to know, thanks. Let me then ask: if getting a tourist visa is simpler, is there any problem in asking for a tourist visa even if your intention is attending a conference?
1. You are misrepresenting the purpose of your visit and you can get deported and/or barred from entering the country. For example, you can be stopped and asked for your passport at any time (this has happened to me multiple times, even though technically it's against Schengen rules).
2. Visiting for 2-3 days makes sense for a conference, but it makes no sense for a vacation and you will raise flags. This would lead to a request for more information from the consulate plus a delay then a rejection, or just a straight rejection.
The dumbest thing is that all this friction is completely unnecessary. The EU can copy the homework of other countries mentioned by the author of the post, but are unable to for unfathomable bureaucratic reasons.
Long weekend "city breaks" are pretty common amongst the UK middle classes.
Can you not go to a conference when in holiday? Isn't the difference who is paying - if you pay then it's a holiday, if work pays then it's business. Could work just give you a bonus to cover the amount at some later point?
What's the rationale for not allowing business travel but allowing the same people to travel for tourism?
Maybe to the Costa Del Sol, but not the lovely city of Melbourne.
The overhead of flying from India to Europe makes a 2-3 day holiday pretty unlikely. The flights depart in the middle of the night, and then there is jet lag.
> Can you not go to a conference when in holiday?
That is immigration fraud. If you’re a white Australian coming to the UK and doing that I seriously doubt there will be any negative consequence (source: an unofficial comment during an unfortunate visit to the Home Office). People in other situations may not fare as well.
Speaking of Australia, it isn’t clear to me at all if the e-visa Americans have to apply for to visit covers conferences or not. It is weird that Americans require a visa to Australia for a short visit (we don’t have a visa waiver agreement for some odd reason), but at least they make it easy, but if it involves a conference…well, I didn’t look into the e-visa terms very closely on my last visit, and very well could have violated visa terms.
Many countries don't draw the distinction at least for people with the right passport. But to the degree there's a real rationale (beyond possibly charging more for a business visa and red tape), it's probably something along the lines of the boundaries between routine business travel in another country and working in that country are blurrier than in the case of tourism and therefore some countries think it should attract more scrutiny.
You're right that I could (and have) attended tech events on my own time and my own dime and that seems like tourism by any reasonable definition but does that fact that I didn't take vacation time and maybe submitted an expense report really fundamentally change that?
Presumably to nearby countries, not via 12-15h flights with layovers, and not after an onerous visa process?
I think you underestimate how much work is needed to submit a visa application. No one in their right mind would spend several days preparing documents and traveling for a total of 30 hours for just a 3 day holiday.
> Can you not go to a conference when in holiday? Isn't the difference who is paying - if you pay then it's a holiday, if work pays then it's business
The difference is "what is the primary purpose of your visit".
There are no clear rules around this, but for Schengen countries generally you decide based on the day spent on each (because that's how you must decide which country to apply to as well, when doing a multi-country trip).
I am visiting Europe this year: attending a conference for 5 days and on holiday for two weeks. My primary purpose is tourism.
If it was 5 days of conference and 4 days of holiday, I would have to submit the application with the conference being the primary purpose, and classified as a business visitor visa.
> What's the rationale for not allowing business travel but allowing the same people to travel for tourism?
No idea, you'd have to ask the consulates.
In Europe with a 1-3 hour time difference and a 1-4 hour flight, yes.
In New York with a 5-hour time difference and an 8-hour flight, not so common. I'm sure that it happens, but it's not at all common. Jetlag alone would make that an athletic event, if your "leaving front door, returning back to front door" time is under 72 hours.
Now extrapolate that to "long weekend in California." and it's again much less common.
If you google "long weekend in Iceland" there are articles (https://www.travelandleisure.com/weekend-getaways/long-weeke..., https://inspiralized.com/lifestyle/a-long-weekend-trip-to-ic...) that suggest doing this. It actually sounds not unreasonable if you can manage to power through that first day.
I just wanted to add that the whole experience was massively stressful and gave me much greater awareness of the challenges faced by people who can’t cross borders easily. I was given the 24 ultimatum when I arrived in Canada which was late on Sunday afternoon UK time. Luckily I had the mobile number of a very dynamic departmental director who was staggered that corporate had totally misunderstood the circumstances of my trip. He kicked some ass to make things happen and I was home and dry, although I didn’t know it at the time. My customers (the Canadian Army, bless them) were also very understanding and put up with my slightly ragged sleep-deprived performance resulting from lengthy phone calls to corporate lawyers in the middle of the night, Canadian time. They introduced me to a senior military stakeholder I had to brief as the ‘criminal software architect’ which was actually a superb icebreaker.
But my heart goes out to people who don’t have this sort of support.
"Which hotel are you staying at?"
"Do you have an itinerary? Can I see it?"
"Why are you coming here?" (With a weird intonation of something like, why would anyone come here to vacation? It's so boring here!")
"What do you plan on doing while you're here?"
"Are you meeting anyone?"
"How do you plan to get back?"
Etc.
I think more often than not, the people asking probably don't even care about what your actual answer is, but want to see how you react to those questions, and if the answers make basic logical sense. I.e. "I'm vacationing for 2 weeks, but don't have a hotel.", or "I'm meeting friends and family at my vacation house, but I have never been here before."
A person might not remember the address of their hotel for example, but they'll be able to give a general description without freaking out, "It's a Hilton in Albany, I don't remember which." I would imagine that they're trying to distinguish between the natural nervousness that people have with interacting with border guards, vs people who are trying to do various illegal activities.
As a fun little sidenote:
I actually got tripped up by a guard one time because he asked a weirdly phrased question, "Is this your vehicle?" I took that to mean, "Is this vehicle stolen?", so I told him "Yes, it is mine." (...because I had paid to rent it). He asked why the plates didn't match my drivers license. I explained that it was a rental, and he got very angry and said, "Well I guess it isn't YOURS then, huh!?"
I didn't realize you could answer "Rental" to strictly Yes or No question! It was such a weird way of phrasing the question, because if I were to say, "No, this isn't my vehicle." the logical follow-up question would have been, "Why are you driving someone else's vehicle? Where are they? Why aren't they driving it!?"
I applied to a tourism Visa in say Netherlands or uk for 2 weeks.
After 5 days, I attend a "conference" of say 2 hours or something. Is it like the man in the suit sends a call to the home ministry who sends a Hollywood style swat team or the American ice agents to drag you out of the border ?
As an example, the US asks for your travel history (where you went and why) and a list of your social media accounts. It would be trivial to correlate a conference related social media post with a stated reason of tourism and flat that.
They might not do this, but I certainly would not want to jeopardise all future travel for that if.
In the U.S.A., lying on a government form is illegal, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001. I can't imagine other countries treating that differently.
If you go to a conference for a hobby that's tourism, right?
ADDED: And people with hobbies/interests like, say, medieval history absolutely will attend a conference/event as part of a vacation even if it has zero connection to a day job.
Whether attending a conference for a hobby counts as a vacation trip or a business trip would be a question for the destination country's consular affairs office.
That's exactly what I was told (as a statement, not as a question) by an official a few years ago when applying for a visa for a trip to Germany.
[1]: Well, probably. The Department of Homeland Security doesn't give an official reason: "The Department of Homeland Security did not explain the reason for this question, and it is not clear why any terrorist, spy, saboteur or mass murderer would answer “yes.” Doing so, whether or not by mistake, does not mean that the person will be banned from the United States, but it doesn’t help." (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/world/europe/terrorist-qu...)
(And as the sibling comment notes, if you're just dropping in for a quick conference and heading home again, that probably is suspicious as a tourist.)