Show HN: My side project – Do I need a visa for...? | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My side project – Do I need a visa for...?

doineedavisafor.com

248 pointsjlangenauer158 comments

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I don't understand the presentation.

Allow the user to choose nationality from a drop down box, then show a world map colored various ways:

- green no visa

- blue for easy to obtain visas

- red for difficult to obtain visas

On a side note, it should probably be "United States citizen" and not "US". Also, US -> China is a very common route that requires a visiting / mailing your passport to a Chinese embassy to obtain a visa that you should probably have listed.

Your suggestion sounds exactly like <Shameless_plug> Visamapper (www.visamapper.com) </Shameless_plug>

But DoIneedAVisaFor is a more direct way to answer the question if you already know your Destination.

I like your site, but why not show the color key below the map?

Thats how I originally had it, then the legend increased in size and refused to fit cleanly under the map and I pulled it out. Would you consider it a huge deal or a minor distraction?

I just tried to visit but got a "can't find the server" error.

not sure why. Works right now. Try again?

I had to drop the www http://visamapper.com/

Usually it's pretty easy to get a Visa on arrival at most African countries, yet when I tried to add that, I was asked to log in through either Google or Facebook (I like neither). When I saw that it required my permission to use some data on my Google account even when I'm not using the site, I declined and then got a typical Rails error page.

The permission to use some data is the minimum permission requested (Email address). The intent here is to use OAuth to allow easy logins, not harvest data. BTW, The entire site is open-source at http://www.github.com/udit99/visamapper, so not only can you a) Verify that there is no foul play, but b) send pull requests with alternative login methods.

To verify that there's no foul play, there would also need to be a way to check that the code on github is what is actually running on the site...

I'm not aware of how to implement such a check. Any ideas?

It looks great. Sadly I couldn't find Singapore in this map (well, it has 182 countries listed), but yeah that may happen when we try to cluster all the information in one single page.

Finding an actual authoritative source on Chinese visa requirements has been difficult - there's a lot of second hand information around, but nothing official that I can find.

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1089.html#e...

How is the state department an authoritative source for Chinese visa requirements? They change them about every 6 months anyways, the invitation letter is a new thing they started last year.

Well you could follow the link they have to the DC Chinese Embassy: http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/visas/

Even those aren't maintained very well. Best to just have a good visa desk at work that keeps up with all the nuances.

Indeed. Probably the easiest way to get a Chinese visa these days it to go to Bangkok. Hand your passport to any travel agency on Ko San road and they'll send a guy over to the embassy to sort everything out for you. And somehow it works.

Way smoother than trying to convince the embassy in LA to process your application, and likely more convenient that going to LA in person (which might not even get you anywhere depending on the whims of the Chinese at that moment).

I've visited China through Beijing and Hong Kong numerous times over the last couple years, and without a doubt the best way to do it is through a Visa intermediary such as travisa.com or A Briggs (http://www.abriggs.com). I've used others in the past, but we had an emergency trip about a year ago where one of our fellow travelers needed to go at the last minute (ie, we were leaving on Weds, and they decided to go on the Sunday before), and A Briggs helped us get them a passport and the Chinese Visa, and had it waiting at the airport for our departure. They also have agents you deal with directly.

I'll definitely use them again. The point though, is that for a nominal fee, it's just easier to have someone who does visas every day handle the China situation for you, at least in my experience.

SEO.

+1 Also, you could preselect the value in the 1st box using Geo-IP DB and/or browser geolocation API[1].

[1] http://diveintohtml5.info/geolocation.html

To be honest, I don't think that easy/difficultis that helpful, especially when people usually know where they want to go. Although this text-based answer is not as impressive visually, and could be improved with automatic linking or perhaps using a map to select origin and destination countries, I think it's better to give the information in textual form to avoid misunderstandings.

When people know where they want, they check the consulate of that country. Actually, even if some website tells you that you don't need a visa, you better check the consulate anyway.

On the other hand a map would be an interesting way to see what country you can easily go.

American citizen should be aliased as well. When I see a list of words like Afghan, Albanian, and Armenian, it makes me think the list describes nationalities as adjectives, not country names. If you ask most US citizens which adjective they'd use to identify their nationality, they'll say American.

All my friends from Canada and South America find this hilarious.

But then South Korea simply calls itself Korea and ignores the north.

So these are people who live outside of the United States that describe their nationality as "American"? Do any of them live in countries that actually have "America" in the name?

One of my canadian friends likes to raise her hand at big meetings when someone asks if there are any americans there.

Wouldn't they be North American?

And if your friend had to choose one and only one descriptor between "Canadian" or "American", what would they say?

No, she just finds it fun that the US has decided to call themselves by the common name of two continents.

I will propose that Norway call itself the United States of Europe and we start calling ourself europeans and poke fun at the EU.

Btw. I'm european, even though I don't live in a country that's even part of the EU (we are part of both the EEA and Schengen area, though)...Norway FTW.

Odd, all my friends from Canada and South America find it entirely unremarkable.

The correct demonym for the U.S. in English is "American".

In Spanish it's 'estadounidense' which is cool, but there's no equivalent in English. Anybody who actually cares about the ambiguity of the U.S. demonym probably has too much time on their hands.

I would disagree. My use case is usually either "I'm considering a vacation in Elbonia, would they let me in", or "OMG, I have a work trip to Elbonia next week, should I get some visa or what?" For both, the big map is useless and the API provided is perfect. Only problem it doesn't cover all countries...

Come on. It's a great little service whether there is a map or not. Drop downs with autocomplete work well for choosing countries.

I especially like that there are links to primary sources and that the service is careful when it doesn't know:

"Sorry, we've no information available. We're careful to only use accurate, first-hand information, but have been unable to confirm the visa requirements for Andorran citizens travelling to Angola."

I suppose that OP wanted feedback. Suggestions for improvements aren't criticism, they're free consulting.

"I don't understand the presentation" as a reaction to two massive dropdowns qualifies as consulting these days?

You get what you pay for.

I agree that there's no need for a map and the dropdowns work okay, but I do also agree that it'd be really neat to have a summary into categories. I know this data isn't human written, but I expect they could be classified into yes/no at least extremely naively.

Disagree that your suggestion should be the only option. Many people are going to travel to a country, and yet they can't pick the country on a map. Being able to input the country name is very important.

I would suggest that the user should be able to type the name, or part of it, and have the interface suggest closest matches for the cases (most) where they get it wrong but close enough.

Regarding the US to China route, this is more complicated than it would seem. While getting a visa is probably the easiest solution, there are some situations where it is not required. An example being that you can enter visa-free into Shanghai for 48 hours if you're in transit through the airport.

There are some other odd visa-on-arrival schemes available for places like Shenzhen if you're arriving via Hong Kong (although I think this isn't available to US citizens, only to Australians, and a few other nationalities). I wouldn't be surprised if this is true of some of the other Special Economic Zones as well (e.g. Hainan island). It can be really hard to find this information though, even through official channels.

So this kind of confusion is what the author is up against when collecting data.

Delta used to have an awesome frontend for Timatic (the system that all of the airlines use for determining their own liability in visa requirement issues) that I used exclusively. Sadly, it seems they've removed it from their new site.

I was able to find a similar offering[1] for free on Gulf Air's site, though.

A nice frontend to Timatic would be awesome, but I suspect that the licensing is too pricey...

[1] http://www.gulfair.com/English/info/prepare/Pages/VisaInform...

Hypothetically, I wonder if there would be legal issues with running a bot to scrape data from Gulf Air's page. They don't seem to have a ToS which prohibits it, as far as I can tell; and I would expect the data itself to be non-copyrightable.

SkyTeam offers Timatic frontend on their website: http://www.skyteam.com/en/your-trip/Services/Visa-and-Health...

*A as well: http://www.staralliance.com/en/services/visa-and-health/

Ouch the fees for Timatic are steep indeed.

0 – 500 transactions: Included in Fixed Fee - EUR 499/yr

501 – 100,000 transactions: EUR (€) 0.1299 per transaction

100,001 – 600,000 transactions: EUR (€) 0.1166 per transaction

600,001 – 1,100,000 transactions: EUR (€) 0.1033 per transaction

1,100,001 – 1,600,000 transactions: EUR (€) 0.0888 per transaction

1,600,001 – 2,100,000 transactions: EUR (€) 0.0816 per transaction

2,100,001 onwards: EUR (€) 0.0743 per transaction

I haven't looked closely at it, but if Timatic are held liable for the accuracy and ultimately responsible (assuming litigation), it might be justified.

Several comments layed out some alternatives, and it's usually fairly easy to figure out where you can go, my personal favorite are the Wikipedia pages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_United_St...

However, there is one edge-case that I do not see covered:

I am a permanent resident of Germany, citizen of Vietnam and hold a valid visa for the US. Sometimes these qualifications allow for entry (for example Mexico). I'd love to see an overview of what other countries I can visit without a visa given my residency and other visas.

So about a year ago, I created Visamapper(www.visamapper.com) for the same purpose.I ended up crowdsourcing the data. Slightly different take on the interface as your project. But I have to say, I'm just a little jealous because visamapper didn't get any attention on HN :-). Anyways, Nice job with the design. Small nitpick: The list of countries at the bottom is unreadable with the current font color.

You might want some country aliases; since the first items in the drop-down had full country names in them, I expected to have to type "united states", not "US".

Works great, otherwise. Seems handy as a standalone service; it'd help even more if integrated into a travel site like Hipmunk.

Also if you can do some "folding" when matching... When I typed "vietnam" it did not match against "Viet Nam"

It's also grammatically incorrect. I am citizen of the United States of America, but an American citizen. The correct demonym in English for a citizen of the United States is American.

Interesting. I'm a citizen of The Netherlands, so assuming a faulty system I searched at 'T' and 'N', but I found it at the correct place, 'Dutch'.

If you follow the format: I'm a <Dutch> citizen. That's actually correct, and what I used intuitively.

This is really cool, and the info is super-useful.

However, your SEO links at the bottom of the page make your site look unnecessarily spammy, especially because the color and font size makes it look like you're trying to hide the links, like someone might have done in GeoCities in the 90's. I understand what you're trying to achieve, but I think you could present it in a way that doesn't look so manipulative. If you make it easy to link to one of your pages, lots of travel blogs and sites will give you backlinks without you needing to create links to every possible combination on your site.

Even the URLs look unnecessarily verbose:

http://www.doineedavisafor.com/visa/us-citizen/travelling/af...

Why is the word "travelling" in the URL? I assume it's because you feel strongly that you will get indexed more prominently if someone uses that word in their search. I wouldn't count on that. You'd do better to rely on the value of your content, instead of trying to artificially game the system. If the URL was http://www.doineedavisafor.com/united-states/afghanistan, you'd still have friendly, easy-to-construct URLs, without the extra cruft.

Where are the links on the bottom of the page that you speak of? Don't see them anywhere...

I guess he took my advice. :)

Interesting project. Outside of interface choices, are there any differences between this and some of the existing offerings like DoYouNeedVisa[1] or VisaMapper[2] (which is crowdsourced and includes the very important information of whether visa are available at the border)?

[1] http://www.doyouneedvisa.com/ [2] http://visamapper.com/

The first one of those has some rather questionable information, so I wouldn't plan your trip based on what it says. For example, it claims Australians can get a visa on arrival in East Timor, which isn't true.

I've not come across visamapper.com, but it looks good.

Neat! I wonder if you could crowd-source some of the missing data. I tested it with "I'm a US Citizen travelling to Macau." but didn't get any result. The US state department web site http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_955.html#en... says no visa is required.

If you're interested I can confirm that a passport is all you need to get into Macao as a U.S. citizen.

This is great. Some thoughts:

* It abbreviates "US" in "US Citizen" but not "United States". I would expect both "United States Citizen" and "US" (country) to work too. It uses "British Citizen" vs. "United Kingdom". Both "United Kingdom Citizen" and "Britain" should work too.

* Using ISO 3166 country codes in the URLs would make them shorter.

GREAT idea. I travel with my girlfriend often and it's a massive pain to work out visa requirements in countries, especially with "com" companies now setting up pretending to be an embassy.

One issue though is how do you keep your database up to date? Some countries (eg Thailand) change their Visa requirements VERY often.

Good work!

For anyone that's wondering, there's data for about 60-odd countries in there at the moment, and I'm adding more every day.

Fwiw, I was searching for united states or american before looking for US. Just got Visas to visit Brazil, Liberia, and Ghana, so I know the process. All the sites for this info suck and you have a good opportunity to make something useful.

Great job on the website! I literally had the same idea a few months back - even thought of a similar title (DoINeedAFuckingVisa.com). Never materialized when I realized just how complex the immigration rules are.

But you know what they say about ideas and execution. Good on you for executing :)

This is awesome! You should also add the ability to post comments about visas and the visa process, since in my experience, some border crossing agents try to overcharge you and you can get them to lower their price simply by stating that you "know" they should be charging x not y. An on the ground report of the visa process can be invaluable next to the usually inaccurate/out-of-date info available through the official channels.

I'm thinking about this, but one of my motivations for doing it was to have only primary-sourced, up-to-date information - there's so much rumour and third-hand information on forums when you search for visa requirements, and I wanted to do something more authoritative and trustworthy.

But it could work as long as the comments are clearly separated from the "official" information.

Or maybe just add a "report an error" option. I've tested the countries I've visited recently and others have probably done the same, so if you see that your official information is contradicted by all (or many) of your users, you can raise a flag and manually check if your official information is still up to date.

"British citizen" is in between "UAE" and "US" citizens, based upon the UK, I suppose, but it would ideally be sorted in alphabetical order.

That aside, providing more links to information on each result would be handy. There are too many details involved to really trust the results. For example, you can't travel to the US under the Visa Waiver Program if you've ever been arrested for anything even if no conviction resulted.

Someone may already have said this: use IP2Country (or similar script) to determine the visitor's most likely location, then pre-select their nationality.

This is great and is certainly something I'll use as I'm exploring summer travel options. One thing I would love to see though, is a simple "yes" or "no" at the front of the sentence. I had to read "US citizens do not require a visa to visit Argentina." a couple of times to make sure I had it right.

I tried a few destinations and found no information for any of them (from Canada/France to China/Taiwan for example).

Also, "French Guyana" doesn't have different requirements from the rest of France, it does not make sense to include it in the list while not including Martinique, Guadeloupe or any of the other French overseas regions. However, the overseas territories have different requirements (New Caledonia is included, but not French Polynesia).

There's also an encoding problem with Monégasque and Burkinabé in the dropdown, and a mistake in the info page - it's Burkinabé, not Burkinabè.

Also none of the place I mention in this comment seem to have information.

Also, I see "French guyanese citizen" in the list (which doesn't exist) but no "French caledonian citizen" (which does exist) even though both places are lisited in the right-hand dropdown.

This is pretty cool. How long did it take you to build, and what were your sources of the data? And also, just out of curiosity, what prompted you to create this project? Was it something that was just interesting to you personally?

I've been working on a little side project, Magnum Opus (http://mag.numop.us). It does things like orchestra job listings, allowing people to find local music teachers, and stuff for teachers to administer their studios (such as managing assignments and lesson schedules). Maybe once it gets further along I'll do a proper Show HN. :)

Great work - nice, clean interface.

One small thing you might want to consider adding is geo-ip identification of the user to detect which country they are visiting from, and default the country selected in "I'm a _ citizen" to that country.

Yes, and it was difficult to figure out what to put after "American" and "United States" both turned up no results, but agree auto-fill would make this an easy go-to for visa information.

Yes, that's definitely on the "to-do" list.

A few points I would like to mention about the interface:

1. Make it easier to find a country. Code an autocomplete textbox or something of the sort.

2. Keep the form on the page after searching. If a user wants to make a second search they shouldn't have to press the back button.

3. There are a bunch of links on the bottom that are very difficult to see with the background.

4. The body is perhaps too transparent. The text on your "About" page blends in with the background a little bit.

Overall, it is a good idea and can be perfected with some simple tweaks. Good work!

I've been toying with autocomplete fields recently. I came across this great article on improving the country selection experience.

http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/10/redesigning-...

jQuery UI Has a cool autocomplete plugin. I've used it recently, figured I'd leave a link for the curious. http://jqueryui.com/autocomplete/

Nice side project!

A dual citizenship feature might be a nice touch - for instance travelling to Brazil is easier on a European passport than an Australian. So it would be great to know what to use when.

One bug report: On the one page - Australian citizens require a visa to visit Canada. Australian citizens do not require a visa to visit Canada.

http://www.doineedavisafor.com/visa/australian-citizen/trave...

Very nice.

One UX suggestion: don't center the text in the drop downs. It makes your eyes jump around when scanning the list, and has made me look past a country I was looking for.

I think you should change the message displayed when there's no data. Being "unable to confirm" whether a Swedish citizen needs a visa to visit Norway comes off as worse than "have not yet added a source".

Particularly so in this example: both countries are part of the Schengen area, i.e. it is obvious that no effort (and nothing wrong with that!) has yet been made to add this information, rather than having been unable to find a source.

Thank you so much! Your site saved us big time! My girlfriend is from one of the visa waiver countries, and she is coming to the U.S. to visit me in June. And guess what? We have never heard of the ESTA requirement until today. I wish online travel ticket agency could be more specific and tell us all the required documents. Does anyone know what would happen if you forgot or didn't know about ESTA?

You get denied boarding - airlines have access to the ESTA system at check-in. Glad to have been of help!

yeah, that's crazy. luckily i had an old passport with a us visa (for complicated reasons) that was still valid. otherwise, they wouldn't have let me on the plane...

Amazing idea, but you probably need more data. I got married recently and we haven't got around to our honeymoon yet. I did a few queries which were relevant to me and they didn't have any information. (Indian citizen, tried cyprus, egypt, indonesia with no results. A few other results were helpful).

Also, like someone mentioned, a map showing all the areas you can visit without visas would be much more helpful.

Indonesia doesn't give any results for a US citizen either:

http://www.doineedavisafor.com/visa/us-citizen/travelling/in...

I was in Bali last year. You give them $25 at the airport and they give you a temporary visa, valid for 30 days. There's an ATM at the Hong Kong airport that pays out in US dollars, in case you need cash for the visa. Yes, the visa fee is 25 USD.

Confirmation here:

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_2052.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Indian_ci...

Here's a spreadsheet (on google docs) that pretty much fulfills the same need: http://goo.gl/RXSQk

You just enter any airport code in the country where you are from, and any airport code in your destination country, then you get the visa information.

To OP: seems like there's quite a bit of information missing, you could try scraping it from the link on that spreadsheet

That's actually using Delta's account for Timatic data. I doubt they'd look kindly on my scraping it.

Text is very hard to read on that background, barely noticeable. I suggest changing background, or text color and making it slightly larger.

That was my first thought as well. Just extending the white translucent box all the way to the bottom of the page would make a big difference.

Just a correction: Venezuelan citizens can travel as tourists to the United Kingdom without the need of a visa, it is only necessary to obtain a visa if you do not have a biometric passport. - http://www.doineedavisafor.com/visa/venezuelan-citizen/trave...

I like the idea, but the entries in the citizenship dropdown seem to be "not quite" sorted. Some examples of out-of-order entries:

Ivorian (between Costa Rican and Croatian), Salvadorian (between Egyptian and Equatorial Guinean), Burmese (between Mozambiquan and Namibian) etc.

[ edit ] Ah are they ordered by country name, not the adjective that's being shown? Unexpected and confusing.

This is awesome. Very useful. Also would be useful is a full list of countries that don't need a visa for, based on my citizenship.

Nice, works for Uruguay :) , small nitpick, it should say "I'm an" not "I'm a" where applicable (for example for Uruguay and other countries that start with vowels).

It would also be nice to set defaults to U.S., and to try and detect the person's country from their IP or something.

Small things, overall it's nice to have and it works nicely (I like the detailed explanations)

Here's why I don't understand the point of a site like this.

I don't know anything about the site. I don't know if it's accurate. I don't know if it's maintained. I can't trust the information on it, so if I get an answer from it, in order to verify it I'll have to do whatever work I would have done if the site didn't exist. I've gained nothing.

EDIT: As mietek points out below, the site does provide precisely this information.

I guess that every answer that the site gives could link back to an authoritative source (such as a site run by the government of the destination country), in order to give you an opportunity to verify that the information is correct.

Isn't this exactly what the site does? If you're snarking on the parent poster, then your subtlety went over my head.

Example: http://www.doineedavisafor.com/visa/polish-citizen/travellin...

"Source: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/citizen/move-live/index_en.htm

Last checked: 4 March, 2013"

Did you actually try it? It gives you a direct link to the relevant document, so you don't have to trust the site and you don't have to go digging.

FYI For "Taiwanese citizen to Germany" and to other states of the Schengen Area, no visa is required since 2011. http://www.taipei.diplo.de/Vertretung/taipei/en/01-Welcome-t...

This is awesome.

I'll get links to this from http://wikioverland.org shortly.

"US citizens do not require a visa to visit Argentina. US citizens do not require a visa to visit Argentina, however US citizens must pay a "reciprocity fee" prior to arrival and present the receipt for doing so when entering Argentina. "

You have to pay the reciprocity fee for a visa as of two years ago.

I know I'm required to have visa for a bunch of places but not sure which ones, would be really cool to see given your nationality all the countries for which you are required to have visa.

btw, I'm Colombian, we don't need visa for Russia and Turkey (Data not available yet in your DB).

A quick rule of thumb for European Union member states: no visas are needed for any EU citizen to go any other EU country (as a tourist). It shows that I need a visa to go from Romania to the UK or Sweden (that is false, Romania, the UK and Sweden are all EU members).

It should be saying "no information available" for those, as I haven't done the research on the transitional arrangements for Romania and Bulgaria that might be in effect (such as in the UK) until 2014.

That is correct, work visas are restricted, tourist visas however are not required and I am not aware of any such requirement between any two EU member states. I haven't used my passport in years, I use my Romanian ID card whenever I travel in the EU (and it is my understanding that any EU citizen can travel - for business or pleasure - within the EU without visas or even a passport).

I'll add that information shortly - for things like EU citizens travelling in the EU, I try to put a little more information than just "no tourist visa is required".

You also don't need a visa for UK -> Switzerland.

Switzerland is also Schengen so you don't even need a passport to enter from other Schengen members (which unfortunately excludes the UK)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area

I am not a travel agent, but I believe even non-EU citizens don't need a visa to travel within the EU - you may only need a visa to enter a EU country.

Sure about that? Romania is not in the Schengen area..

http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/bor...

Yes, I'm sure. Your ID (not necessarily a passport) is still checked at the border of the Schengen space (at the entry point) but you don't need a passport or a visa of any kind. You just show your Romanian ID to the customs officer and then enter the country.

There's a document issued by the Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs: http://www.mai.gov.ro/Documente/Utile/Calatoria%20in%20Europ... (unfortunately they didn't bother writing it in anything other than Romanian) - it clearly states that Romanians do not need visas for any EU country (but they still need either a passport or an ID card).

That is a great side project and one that has helped me already. Kudos for linking to the first-hand info. Now, I just found some info that you currently don't have on the site. I'll contact you via email with the link, but maybe you want to have a form for that?

The non-standard select lists made this extremely difficult to use on iPhone.

You should put the US as the first choice in the drop down box, since that's where most of your traffic will come from. Later when you have more data, you could put the top 15 in the first choices.

Even better, using the IP / language settings, they could probably make an educated guess! : )

Really, Americans travel abroad now? ;)

I wonder how you keep the visa requirements up to date. I've worked on a visa project before and I know that visa requirements change all the time and there's no central place to get those updates.

Awesome idea and it works great. What would be really cool is providing a public API. I'm working on building a site that list conferences and this would be really beneficial to incorporate.

Yes! Simple and useful for me (I travel a lot, was looking up this kind of info yesterday). I would change up the background since its a bit distracting. Congrat on shipping!

How about just displaying the result below as soon as the selection is changed? Having me click a button, and then click 'Back' to try a new combo, is annoying.

Other than that, great idea :)

Is there a way to list the visa requirements for a US citizen? (just a simple list of the other countries and whether or not a visa is required to visit those countries)

Not right at the moment, but I might put that in later once I've got more of that information. Wikipedia already has this, though:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_United_St...

Indian citizen --> Cambodia. Need visa; you can get an E-Visa or get it on arrival.

http://www.mfaic.gov.kh/evisa/

Been there, done that :)

See also this iPhone/iPad app built by a friend: http://www.uquery.com/apps/Ji3W1/got-visa

Serves the same purpose as http://www.visahq.com/, but it would nice to see a better presentation.

Interesting, except it seems hard to use. For example, on the front page, I can't select citizenship country. Also, playing with it, I selected: Chile visa, for a Mexican national, living in China (http://chile.visahq.cn/requirements/Mexico/resident-China/), and the whole site switched to Chinese. If I was a Mexican national, why would I want the site in Chinese, even if I was living there?

Nice work! Noticed one issue though: did a US Citizen -> Brazil check and it said I didn't need a visa but then says I do need one.

Thanks for picking this up - I've fixed that now!

Wow, thanks. That's one of the question I often couldn't find an answer for and thusly has kept me from travelling a few times. :)

Humm ... Doesn't work for a huge number of things I entered:

Have a lot of friends and family in Asia, and too many answers are "dunno, sorry".

I would also provide advice on where to apply for a visa. The "nearest X embassy" is not too helpful. Otherwise, great work!

Works neat. One question, why the background image? such a waste of resources and it doesn't add anything at all.

United States -> China (a pretty important route that does require a visa) says no information.

North Korean citizens can live and work in North Korea without limit by virtue of their citizenship.

I'm not so sure

Very cool. I'd add the ability to locate the nearest embassy/consulate based on GeoLocation.

It does not work in IE9 -- screen flashes but info not displayed. I use large fonts.

It DOES work in Chrome.

That's a great idea but it's not working for me. I'm french and visiting HongKong soon.

Really well done and love the SEO-ness that provides real value for folks! Nice tool

Thanks for making this! I'm making travel plans right now and it's quite handy.

I'm a bit annoyed that British Citizen is filed under U (for United Kingdom).

You're "annoyed" with a useful service that you didn't even know existed until five minutes ago?

It isn't (though that was what I was expecting); "British" works.

(Though it can't tell me whether I need a visa for Ukraine, so I'm not enormously impressed)

If you actually need to know, rather than that just being an example: you don't. You used to have to fill in a form on arrival, but even that was abolished a year or so ago.

Irish Citizen => Nepal; Visa required...not in your database yet.

Actually, I'm putting data in for Nepal right as we speak. And Irish citizens don't need a visa before arriving in Nepal, they can get one at the border.

Make sure to write the requirements for visa on arrival. http://www.doineedavisafor.com/visa/swedish-citizen/travelli...

$20 and recent passport photo, or you can bribe them with $10.

So an Irish citizen still needs to obtain a visa then?

I've been multiple times, always got the visa before hand, am married to a Nepalese citizen, still needed a visa.

The US to India has a spelling error. Visa is spelled vist.

This is awesome. Where did you get all the data from btw?

Tried Australian going to Morocco and China. "Sorry, we've no information available." Could've got more data in there before playing your "Show HN" card maybe.

and I had the same problem - New Zealander going to France. The answer, btw, is No visa required for New Zealanders in the Shengen agreement area.

To be fair, there are approximately 200 countries in this world. So you'll need data for about 200^2 = 40,000 different connections, and that's before considering subtleties like length of stay, PR statuses, etc.

Sure. I did say "more" rather than "all"; others have noted the absence of American in China. It'd make sense to prioritise some key ones before launching.

Information for Australians is at Smart Traveller FWIW, under Entry/Exit info. e.g.,

http://www.smartraveller.gov.au/zw-cgi/view/Advice/China

How to help improving information?

Congrats, cool.

very clever URL for the resulting page

Might want to put in some 'alias' type of names for some common countries, like England for United Kingdom for example.

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