WORST VISA PROCESS...EVER
I’m almost convinced
that their system can
only be this bad if it’s
intentional.
In my various travels I’ve had to interact with some bureaucratic processes that you could range from less than ideal to colonoscopy level of pain in the ass.
Turkmenistan for instance will grant you a visa that’s good for only 5 specific days. It required a tremendous amount of planning (and guesswork) to figure out when exactly that window would be in the middle of a seven week road trip.
Russia had an incredibly tedious process. It required navigating a slew of websites that google poorly translates, getting a “letter of invitation”, oh yeah and also driving down to the Russian embassy in Houston and doing an in-person interview with someone – not to mention bringing notarized letters for anyone in your traveling party stating that you are applying for them. THEN coming back to Houston a week later to pick up the passports. It was hands down the most confusing and excruciating visa process.
Until now…
Before I continue, this is a casual reminder that there are 9 countries with nuclear weapons and India is one of them.
There are exactly four pages that you need to fill out in order to directly apply for an e-visa. I say directly because you could choose to pay service to do this for you, but instead of spending only $25 it would run you $90 and above. I almost caved.
I am not exaggerating when I say that it took me almost a week to get past page three.
On it’s face, nothing about this is complicated. And yet I filled this out no less than fifteen separate times. Why? Because this is the worst government website I’ve ever seen.
The first time I filled it out I was on my phone. That’s when I realized that the “save and temporarily exit” button is completely useless unless every field is filled out. Ok small oversight, no big deal.
Wrong.
Over the next few days I honestly can’t even count how many times I filled out this exact form. Same result, nothing saved on this step. That’s when I turned to google and learned I about issues I hadn’t even experienced yet, the other biggest one being that the site will just straight fucking time out on you. There are no warnings about what characters may or may not go in certain fields – ie avoid commas and literally any character that isn’t a letter.
This is so prevalent that there are on reddit and every travel forum you can think of, everyone with their own suggestions and how they made it through. Use a chrome browser, only use the website “after hours”, wiggle your left ear and recite an ancient Indian poem.
I tried everything, nothing worked. I was about to just give up and overpay for another company to do this for me. And then I figured it out.
YOU CAN ONLY COMPLETE THIS RIDICULOUS PROCESS USING THE MICROSOFT EDGE BROWSER…
…AND ONLY AFTER GOING INTO YOUR BROWSER SETTINGS AND TELLING EDGE TO LOAD USING:
“INTERNET EXPLORER COMPATIBILITY MODE”
And wouldn’t you know it, that worked. 48 hours later and my visa was approved. (The site still timed out several times for me, as well as when I went back to do Jake’s visa)
In retrospect it totally makes sense, I mean why not have your entire system be compatiblle with an internet browser that even Microsoft phased out 10 years ago?
Many online speculate the government makes their entire web architecture purposefully wonky to force you to use a 3rd party service so that they can take a cut from the jacked up fees. I’m not a conspiracy guy, but honestly this one kinda makes sense. Even I was about to tap out from this stupid process.
