World Travel Requirements Demystified

It all starts with catching wind of a faraway place you develop a strong desire to visit, mostly through something about that particular place which appears on TV, online or something which is shared by someone else who has visited. Once desire turns into some serious action though, getting a passport is just the start of what is an adventure fraught with the type of red-tape which basically just comes down to providing evidence of your existence. Apart from the ESTA register of 38 countries whose citizens can essentially travel to the USA visa-free and other visa waiver arrangements similar to ESTA USA, world travel requirements are generally based on how the traveller visiting a certain destination interacts with that destination’s resources.

Passport holders of certain countries tell a story of just how worthless they feel their passports really are, serving no real purpose other than for some official identification, quite simply because they have to pull all manner of tricks and jump through so many hoops just to get a visa which allows them to travel to certain countries. This is in contrast to countries like Japan or UAE, whose citizens hold some of the most valuable passports in the world. In any case, Visa requirements are often very rigorous and perhaps in some cases a bit too complicated when they could be much, much simpler.

Someone whose passport is bursting at the seams with various stamps from a plethora of visited countries perhaps bears enough proof that they travel for leisure, they obviously travel frequently, they can afford their travel lifestyle, and they travel with the intention of returning back to their native land or to the their land of permanent residence. Since it is indeed at times a mere formality, a strict adherence to the visa-compliance rules put in place is enforced either way, with some room left for the immigration officer handling the case to apply a little bit of their own discretion.

This discretion is perhaps the pivotal part of determining whether or not the eager traveller can indeed visit their destination of choice or not, so it can really go either way, depending on a number of different factors, some of which truly are beyond the control of the traveller. If you can’t present proof of income for instance, or even if you can’t provide proof of residence, those are some very important factors which almost exclusively determine whether or not you’re deemed a good candidate to visit a certain country.

The secret all travellers will appreciate being in on about improving their chances of visa compliance is that of just being able to prove, essentially, that you have every intention of coming back home, if you’re travelling for leisure purposes, otherwise just being able to prove that you won’t be a financial or social (but mainly financial) burden on the state you’re planning to visit. Otherwise with the likes of the 38-country ESTA register of those travellers who can by-pass the regular US visa application process and register online via the ESTA USA visa waiver program, the likelihood of the would-be traveller from those 38 countries not being a burden on the state is implied, therefore getting approved is a lot less burdensome in itself.