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.
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."
But DoIneedAVisaFor is a more direct way to answer the question if you already know your Destination.
But then South Korea simply calls itself Korea and ignores the north.
I will propose that Norway call itself the United States of Europe and we start calling ourself europeans and poke fun at the EU.
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.
On the other hand a map would be an interesting way to see what country you can easily go.
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.
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'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.
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.