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Show HN: Visalist – Find visa requirements for countries around the world
- sombremesa 8y agoPersonally, I prefer to use https://www.passportindex.org https://www.passportindex.org - how does this compare?
- hellofunk 8y agoThis is rather basic -- what if your home country is different than the country you live in? Your flexibility to travel, for example in Europe, is quite different if you have a European ID card even if you are not from there. You still need visas to some countries but not others, depending on both your ID card as well as your home country.
- pcl 8y agoCan you expand on that a bit? I'm a US citizen living in Norway (a member of the EEA but not the EU). I know that I can use the EEA immigration lines at many (but not necessarily all) checkpoints in EEA countries if I present them with my Norwegian residence card at the window. Are there other travel optimizations, either in-region or elsewhere, that I should look into? Are they all dependent on a residence card, or does a Norwegian driver license or other documentation confer additional rights?
- hellofunk 8y agoConsider someone from a country with poor passport freedoms. Normally, if they lived in their home country, they'd need visas for lots of places. But now they live in Europe. Thus, the places that require visas depends on: 1) The home country. 2) The destination country. 3) The holding of other residence permits. That person does not need a visa if they live in Germany and want to travel to Belgium, but they do if they want to visit London. And the only way to know that is by considering all of the above points, not just their home country.
- seeadot 8y agoThis is great...will be using it quite a bit! Thanks for making it
- 1hakr 8y agoI'm glad you found it useful
- widforss 8y agoGood work! Just something I reacted to as a Swede is that the Åland Islands, the Faroe Islands and Greenland are listed as separate countries. Citizens of these areas hold Finnish or Danish passports respectively.
- Zijj 8y agoNot sure about the Åland Islands, but at least Faroe and Greenland have a different visa regime than Denmark (they are both not in Schengen. Also Danish citizen residing e.g. in the Faroe are not seen as Schengen citizen, or something like that). Generally a hard edge case are all those autonomous or semiautonomous territories. Like all the islands of UK and France (some French territories are part of the EU, some are not). It's often a lot harder to get info on the visa requirements for those.
- crypt1d 8y agoBookmarked. Thanks for this! Some feedback based on first impression: The title on the front page says "Find countries to travel to" but then I'm suppose to specify my "home country", which I find just _slightly_ counter-intuitive. I'd suggest to change it up a bit so that I can specify home country and, optionally, a destination I have in mind. Then I'd get results specific for that country only (including, eg, transit visas). I'd also replace "home country" with "citizenship", since I may have a passport of one country, but live in another (which is fairly common in some parts of EU, for example). Many people also have dual citizenship.
- crypt1d 8y agoAlso, out of curiosity, how do u ensure this information stays up to date?
- 1hakr 8y agoI'm planning to add crowdsource features
- abc-xyz 8y agoWhy not just scrape the info from Wikipedia? It will be a lot easier for you to maintain, you'll have access to more data than you do now, and the information will be a lot more accurate. You can also fetch the latest info once a day (or more often for that matter) without worrying about your IP being blacklisted. Even if you had a million active users then I doubt you'd end up with more accurate and up-to-date info than what you can find on Wikipedia. To me it also seems very misleading when countries that only allow 15-30 days visa-free entry are being listed as visa free. I like the layout of the website, but I personally can't see myself using it as long as I still need to visit Wikipedia for accurate information with regard to visa free duration.
- 1hakr 8y agoI understand. Honestly even in wikipedia, the duration is not always available. I will try to add visa free duration aswell so its useful.
- edtau 8y agoReally nice. If an eVisa is available for my selection, consider offering me a link so I can sign up direct... and, as an alternative, possibly wrapper a service around this to submit the application process on my behalf (making clear this is a paid/premium service).
- 1hakr 8y agoInteresting, i havent thought about it yet. But i guess then i have to build a company around this as it wont be a microstartup anymore!
- Ninn 8y agoMicrostartup? Do you mean just a webpage, which is exclusively not a startup/buisness?
- nathan_f77 8y ago> But i guess then i have to build a company around this That was my problem too, and it's why I eventually dropped the idea. Check out my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18643591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18643591 I'm not sure if crowdsourced data would work, and I think this probably needs a team of researchers and immigration experts to give people enough confidence (especially if they're going to be paying for something.) Or at least a license to use the Timatic data. I went down this road a while ago and realized that I would probably become either a Timatic competitor, or a visa agency like https://www.visahq.com https://www.visahq.com
- pard68 8y agoI am amazed by the number of places which I (USA citizen) can travel to without a visa.
- Cyph0n 8y agoIt's something many of us don't really think about, but it ends up being quite convenient. For example, citizens of most countries cannot book a multi-leg trip (not single booking) without a visa, simply because that would require going through passport control to board the next leg.
- 1hakr 8y agoYes indeed!
- amelius 8y agoShouldn't it really be called "visamatrix", because you can lookup based on home and destination countries?
- 1hakr 8y agoSo basically for every person, its a list of countries they can travel based on their home country, hence the name. But yes it can be called that aswell!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- amelius 8y agoPerhaps you could add relevant links, for example where a user can apply for an e-Visa. Or addresses of consulates, etc. Example visa application letters, and stuff like that.
- _0nac 8y agoInteresting, but how do you keep this up to date? These requirement change constantly and the only reliable source I'm aware of, Timatic (which is what airlines use), is copyrighted and quite tightly locked down. Wikipedia does crowdsource this info fairly effectively though, sample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Indian_citizens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Indian_c...
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y agoYou do have to be careful and read the fine print. This year, I was turned away at the Belarusian-Lithuanian border (US citizen) because I had read on that Wikipedia page that it was Visa free. In fact, it is only visa free if you arrive via the Minsk airport. Fortunately I was only driving through a tiny part of Belarus on my way to Poland so it was a simple matter of another 30 minutes or so of driving to enter Poland via the Lithuanian border.
- mynegation 8y agoI was confused by the order of countries and thought you were turned away by Lithuanians. Being turned away by Belorussians as a US citizen makes much more sense.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoGreat reminder. Always check with that country's embassy or risk a ruined vacation and much worse.
- krn 8y agoTo be fair, visa-free entry into Belarus for up to 30 days is a completely new thing[1]. Unlike most visa-free regimes, it's not driven by any international agreements, but rather by a Belarusian initiative to promote tourism in the country. Therefore, they can set their own requirements, and it's still not possible to take a 2-hour train from Vilnius to Minsk without a visa. The entire program can be cancelled at any time by one side, since Belarusians don't have the same visa-free access to the EU. [1] https://www.belarus.by/rel_image/6400 https://www.belarus.by/rel_image/6400
- sfifs 8y agoThe problem with this kind of stuff is how do you keep these up to date. Visa policies change all the time and generally don't get a lot of publicity. There is a reason there are specialist visa agencies like CIBT
- 1hakr 8y agoMy plan is to collect as much data as possible and then build crowdsourcing features so that the community will keep the data up to date. I think that the only way to make #TravelTensionFree
- grecy 8y agoI'd be curious to know where you got this data from. Also note: Many, many countries have a different policy if you are flying in (some kind of e-visa) or if you are driving in, where you need a physical visa in your passport. Ethiopia is exactly that right now for many passport holders.
- quanto 8y agoGreat website. How do you ensure that all visa information is up to date? Do you automatically parse visa policy changes on official government web pages? I made a single spot check (USA -> VNM), and the website seems to conflate e-visa with visa on arrival (they are different for Vietnam).
- gingerlime 8y agoI also spotted what I believe to be inaccurate about Vietnam. I think passport holders of some countries can visit without a visa for up to 14 days, but if you're travelling for longer, visa is required.
- Holybeds 8y ago> Do you automatically parse visa policy changes on official government web pages? Lol. That won't work well.
- jarofgreen 8y agoNo it won't. But you could watch for any changes on certain webpages and then flag those webpages to a human for them to check.
- Holybeds 8y agoGlhf with that. Honestly, relying on any such work flow to find something as critical as visa requirements is insane. At least I wouldn't want to rely on some service which failed to detect that some Russian government page updated their web page and considers the page outdated. The page could still exist while incoming links are removed or similar.
- jarofgreen 8y agoI'm not saying this is perfect or it's all you need, but it's something. To be honest, as someone who's done crowd sourced projects before this entire project sounds .... very difficult. If it was my project, I'd have worked on these "crowd sourced" elements from the start, not as a "planning to do" - because I think the only way this will work long term is to get those right. And getting them right will be very difficult to do. Also, I'd link to source material much more prominently. As a reader, I'm not inclined to trust a random unofficial page on the internet - especially on anything as important as Visas - so providing lots of links I can spent 10 minutes following up on to reassure myself would be great. Oh, and big timestamps showing when a piece of info was last checked/updated. To the creator - sorry to be down. Good luck!
- dewey 8y agoWhat's the difference to https://www.passportindex.org/comparebyPassport.php?p1=ch&fl=&s=yes https://www.passportindex.org/comparebyPassport.php?p1=ch&fl...
- degenerate 8y agoAt a quick glance, passportindex says "visa required" but doesn't give all the gritty details of what's needed in bullet form.
- dewey 8y agoI checked "Swiss passport" and "Malaysia" and it has less data than passportindex. visalist.io: "Visa is not required for a certain period, or there is freedom of movement" https://visalist.io/malaysia/visa-requirements/switzerland https://visalist.io/malaysia/visa-requirements/switzerland passportindex.org: "visa-free / 90 days" https://www.passportindex.org/comparebyPassport.php?p1=ch&fl=MY,&s=yes https://www.passportindex.org/comparebyPassport.php?p1=ch&fl...
- projectramo 8y agoThis is a handsome site. For some reason I am quite curious about this kind of thing and keep looking up passports I don’t have for countries I won’t visit. I use Wikipedia which is pretty good. What is missing is all the weird non visitor visas. For instance Canadians might work in the US on a TN visa or Australians can work on the UK for a year if they’re under some age (30? 35?) It’s that sort of thing that would be useful. If Americans can work visa free in Mongolia for up to 6 months, it would be great to know. (I doubt this is the case)
- selimthegrim 8y agoThere’s also that weird US visa that Australians can get courtesy of Bush 43
- SalMonella 8y agoNathaniel. I can see what your saying... Paul`s remark is neat, on thursday I got a top of the range Nissan GT-R: after making $6612 this last four weeks and just a little over ten-k last munth. this is certainly the easiest work Ive had. I started this five months/ago and almost straight away began to make more than $71 per-hour. I work through this website, www.Mesalary.com
- SEJeff 8y agoIt was a quid-pro-quo for them going to Iraq and Afghanistan wars with us. Seems entirely reasonable to give your closest allies a different set of "rules" in exchange for their help.
- 1hakr 8y agoYes! i wanted to just validate the idea. Now that its fully validated, i will add more types of visa!
- projectramo 8y agoOh, give it a week after the HN hug to see if it’s still kicking.
- mchannon 8y agoThe color coding between the two most popular categories could stand to be more distinct. Discerning between aqua and turquoise is harder than I thought it would be. People with felony convictions in their home country may also be refused entry to some visa-free countries and not others, and while it's a rat's nest of exceptions and procedures to sift through, it would make this site far more interesting and useful to show which visa-free countries will still deny entry.
- sneakware 8y agoGood job! Also reminds me of https://www.markuslerner.com/travelscope https://www.markuslerner.com/travelscope
- 1hakr 8y agoYes, useful but doesnt have official embassy link, visa application link, fees link and document checklist, which i think are super useful for many.
- golergka 8y agoWhere do I specify my second citizenship?
- dewey 8y agoWhy does it matter? You can only enter with one passport anyway so just try the two? There's no "combine passports to level up" in the visa world.
- golergka 8y agoWell, having to manually combine the results in two or more tabs pretty much defeats the purpose of this site, doesn't it?
- paulie_a 8y agoYou don't level up but you can enter more easily depending on dual citizenship. You use the one that has less friction.
- amelius 8y agoDoes having more passports work "additively" or "subtractively"? For example I can imagine that a person with only a UK passport can enter the US more freely than a person with both a UK and Iraqi passport.
- dewey 8y agoCountries usually don't know which passports you have (If you enter for the first time and they don't have some kind of data-sharing agreement) so you'd just enter with the one that's easier not by showing all of yours.
- amelius 8y agoThere is no question about other nationalities on the visa application form?
- known 8y agoJust in time. I was planning for a vacation. Thanks.
- 1hakr 8y agoHappy to help.
- MlkedChocolate 8y agonice, however this information is not too hard to get myself. Add Dual nationality/ multi-nationality, and that would actually save me time. (single nationals can just search for any website, whereas dual nationals would want to search for 2 as they have more options, and if they only have to use your website that saves their time!) :)
- 1hakr 8y agoI wanted to first validate the idea, now that its proven useful, i will add these features aswell. Thanks for the feedback.
- ganeshkrishnan 8y agoMulti-nationality is becoming more and more common especially with permanent residency visas
- jbverschoor 8y agoAwesome site. Do lots of seo, and you'll be good
- 1hakr 8y agoThanks, thats one things i'm not very good at. still learning!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fickleycurious 8y agoWhy don't add a second column under the map to use the extra white space ?
- 1hakr 8y agoi was thinking of adding useful tips / content in the future
- fickleycurious 8y agoMakes sense. It would be nice if the results refresh as I zoom in the map.
- somberi 8y agoA big thumbs up. Very useful. As an Indian citizen, I have traveled close to 50 countries (not including business trips) and Indian citizens, apart from a handful of countries, need visa for most of the world. This site comes in handy. If possible, consider adding which countries have exemptions for holders of Permanent Residency (Greencard), or an Australian PR and such.
- ganeshkrishnan 8y agoSo excruciatingly painful to travel on the Indian passport. I was rejected from visiting my fiancee in France even though I had a UK, Swiss (was not schengen in 2007) and H1b visa on my passport. Also visa requirements are by the passport you are holding not usually the PR so requirements don't change that much.
- parthdesai 8y agoDepends, for example if you have a valid Canadian/American visa and Indian passport, you don't need a visa to travel to Mexico.
- avh02 8y agoA lot of countries grant visa free access to holders of e.g: us visit visa or schengen residency, they call it a substitute visa
- vishnu_ks 8y agoI had no idea about this. Thanks! For anyone, curious here are the countries you can travel with a US visa. https://www.visatraveler.com/blog/travel-20-countries-visa-free-with-us-visa/ https://www.visatraveler.com/blog/travel-20-countries-visa-f...
- 1hakr 8y agoYes, there are some visas which are useful. Will add it soon.
- projectramo 8y ago
- gopalakrishnans 8y agoIs there a way for US/Canadian long term visa holders to check their visa requirements? E.g. Indian citizens are normally required to get visa for Mexico/Philippines. But with a H1B visa from USA they can travel visa free / visa on arrival.
- 1hakr 8y agoNot currently but that in my plan. Stay tuned!
- jlangenauer 8y agoFunnily enough, about 5 years ago, I did pretty much the same thing. It turned out to be a right pain to actually find, and keep all the data up to date. (Comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5434186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5434186 - the actual site has been taken down)
- 1hakr 8y agoHi there! I'm planning to add crwodsource features so the community will keep the data updated.
- nathan_f77 8y agoI was planning to build a visa site as well, and I also wanted to fill in the all the visa application forms online [1]. That's actually one of the main reasons that I built FormAPI [2]. I decided to stop working on this visa list / forms idea. I think I could make a bit money from ads (hotels, airlines, etc.), but I can't think of any subscription models, and I personally wouldn't pay any one-time fees just to fill out some forms. I think most people would rather use a pen than enter their credit card details. It would also be far too much work to organize all of these application forms and stay up to date with visa requirements. I just wanted some passive income and wasn't ready to schlep [3]. But I think it could be done with VC funding and a team of salespeople and immigration experts. You need people calling or emailing embassies, or visiting them in person, and making sure that they know about these filled-in forms and are willing to accept them. I was also thinking that I would eventually build a SaaS service for every embassy, so that people could apply online and track their applications. Could start with filling out the forms, and then eventually digitize the process and cut out the paper. But I was worried about turning into another online visa agency where I was just a middle-man. That's a service business with low margins, and it would be easy to settle into that and get stuck there. Anyway, it's a huge project, so it's not something I could do by myself. Also trying to sell software to government and immigration agencies is a really bad idea (from personal experience.) But maybe there's an opportunity here, so let me know if anyone is interested in working on that. [1] https://www.visaforms.co https://www.visaforms.co [2] https://formapi.io https://formapi.io [3] http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
- 4ad 8y agoThe site asks for "home country" when it really means citizenship. Not the same thing at all. Also, it's missing a way to input multiple citizenships.
- 1hakr 8y agoI wanted to start with the basic usecase and validate the idea if it will be useful. Now that i see there are lot of people found it useful, i will try to add these additional usecases aswell. Thanks for the feedback.
- mikface 8y agoGood job! Nice UI. But little but very important note for people from those countries: Add region called "Central Europe". Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Hungarians... they hate being marked as eastern europeans ;)
- bergerjac 8y agoAs an American who visited all those countries and conversed with multiple citizens from each of those countries, they do remind you of the "Central Europe" thing.. However, they don't understand that for Americans, "Eastern Europe" isn't geographic; it's geopolitical... essentially, Europe east of the former Berlin Wall There's South America the continent, but for some Spanish people (and possibly other peoples), "South America" is everything south of America (starting with Mexico)
- 1hakr 8y agoYes all these continents, countries, regions, subregions are very confusing
- tremendo 8y agoI am from México, and came here to comment because the posted website says "Mexico is part of Central America", and well, No. México is definitely, absolutely, unequivocally in North America.
- mikface 8y agoBut that's it! We hate to be connected with former Soviet eastern block. Therefore it's even more important for us to be considered and called Central Europe ;)
- cambalache 8y agoWhich Spanish people? No one in Latin America(or for that matter in Spain) use your weird definition for South America.For classifying America or the Americas there are 2 different models: the 2 continent model (that Anglo people use among others) and the 1 continent model that we use in Latin America. In neither of those 2 models Mexico is considered a part of South America.
- biztos 8y agoWell done! I like it as a potential way to brainstorm travel. However I would not use it as a definitive resource simply because there is no authoritative central source for the data, and the official sources are sometimes very messy (I assume you're scraping consular websites to keep current). Feature suggestion: show the name of the country when hovering on the map.
- cfv 8y agoWhile this is super cool, as an Argentinian I show up as visa-free for a bunch of Schengen countries, which while strictly not false it's not super useful: We get 3 out of every 6 months stay, and the list would prob be a lot more useful to people who don't know this if these things were somehow displayed; it's after all not a minor caveat when picking travel destinations
- alexanderchr 8y agoI believe there are few countries in the world where you can stay 3+ months on a visa-free entry no matter what passport you hold. Usually you need a visa to stay longer than that.
- 1hakr 8y agoThanks, i didnt know this. I will add this info aswell.
- SalMonella 8y agoNathaniel. I can see what your saying... Paul`s remark is neat, on thursday I got a top of the range Nissan GT-R: after making $6612 this last four weeks and just a little over ten-k last munth. this is certainly the easiest work Ive had. I started this five months/ago and almost straight away began to make more than $71 per-hour. I work through this website, www.Mesalary.com
- kenneth 8y agoGreat website! I travel a ton (50+ countries in the last few years) and usually use Wikipedia to check visa requirements. I'll be switching to this. Where did you import all this data from in a structured manner? How do you plan on keeping it up to date? Are you associated with a commercial enterprise in the space (e.g. travel startup)?
- 1hakr 8y agoSo i collected this manually. My plan is to add crowdsource data, so the data is maintained by the travel community. No, i'm just a digital nomad, coding his way thrugh life :)
- fsniper 8y agoGreat job. If you can keep it uptodate, this would be the first stop before travel. One thing that it can be improved is showing transit Visa requirements. Multiple stop flights are cheaper , but transit visa information is hard to gather.
- 1hakr 8y agoWonderful feedback. I'm just trying to validate the idea. once there is traction, then i will add more visas. I want to make visalist one stop shop for all visa requirement needs
- bergerjac 8y agoSelecting USA, many countries are showing "13 to 11 hours ahead" for the time difference. I expect it to be "11 to 13 hours ahead" (numbers of ranges going smaller to larger)
- digianarchist 8y agoMissing some of the more complex edge cases. Holding permanent residency in Canada allows access to more countries. Cuba for example: "However, they are eligible to travel to Cuba with a tourist card if they also hold a valid visa or permanent residence permit issued by Canada, the United States or an EU member state." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_policy_of_Cuba#Visa_required https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_policy_of_Cuba#Visa_requi...
- abhishek0318 8y ago"Choose your home country" doesn't work on Firefox 63.
- 1hakr 8y agoSorry to hear that. I just tried on firefox 63 and it works. Which OS?
- sashavingardt2 8y agoIndonesia is visa on arrival for US citizens
- tgamblin 8y agoHow do you handle some of the more obscure cases? For example, citizens of some countries, including the US, can do a short, visa-free stay in China if they’re transiting through the major airports (https://www.travelchinaguide.com/embassy/visa/transit.htm https://www.travelchinaguide.com/embassy/visa/transit.htm). I saw Beijing this way coming back to SF from Taiwan. It was a pain to find all the details about how to apply, and a site like this could help people find out about such opportunities. e.g., you could match trip itinieraries to interesting stopovers.
- 1hakr 8y agoThis is super interesting! Will look into it.
- gandutraveler 8y agoAnother case you could add is for citizens of country A but resident of Country B. For e.g. Indian citizen residing in US or has valid US Visa gets Visa free travel to Mexico and other countries.
- gnicholas 8y agoNice looking site. As others have pointed out, it's important to be 100% credible so that people can trust that the results are correct and up-to-date. The overall look of the site is consistent with this, but having "by 1HaKr" in the lower right would be a red flag for some folks who think of "hackers" as exclusively black hat. It would help the site's credibility if you linked to authoritative source documents showing that you do/don't need a visa for a particular country, so that folks can trust that your third-party site is correct. It would also be handy if you could include requirements related to international driver's license, IMO. Lastly, the button "LETS GO!" needs an apostrophe.
- 1hakr 8y agoThis is super useful feedback. I will change my name there. There are already links to official government websites. About driving, license, i will add that. Also thanks for pointing out the typo.
- ableal 8y agoThanks, nice tool, bookmarked. I'll second that "give an authoritative basis" advice. Two minor items that struck me: - Country code, I'd suggest going with alpha2 from iso 3166, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 (Portugal is usually .pt/PT =alpha2 , sometimes POR, PRT=alpha3 is kind of rare) - Something strange about the sorting of the left column, mine goes U V V V A by country initial on (default) "visa type" ...
- 1hakr 8y agoThis is very useful. Thanks a lot.
- fermienrico 8y agoAlso, the visa-free and e-visa on arrival should be of different color. If anything else, e-visa should be closer to yellow since it is still a visa, albeit applied online. Visa-free countries should have its own distinctive color.
- MagicPropmaker 8y agoYou won't know for sure, however, until you check with an official Government source. I don't know what the utility of a 3rd party version of this is. Usually people only go to a limited set of countries on every trip, so it's not a big burden to go. And I found an error on the first country I checked USA -> Belarus. You don't need a Visa only if you're entering through the Airport and staying less than 5 days. If you're crossing the border from Lithuania by car, you do need one.
- redindian75 8y agowhich country passport you hold is what makes the difference, not your home country (residency). Example: One can hold Srilankan Passport, but home country now is USA (Perm Residency Greencard)
- complex1314 8y agoNice! Like the map with colors. For Schengen it is not accurate though, e.g. from Iceland and Norway all of EU is visa free.
- LorenPechtel 8y agoI checked one combination for which I am fairly aware of the details and I find multiple errors: USA, visiting China. It tells me 30 day stay, 90 day visa validity--but down in "tips" it correctly says I would get a 10 year visa. (In practice--I hold a 60 day stay visa, my (China-born) wife has a 90 day stay. These are by no means our first visas, though.) It also says registration is required within 24 hours--this is the rule for urban areas, in rural ones it's 72 hours. Also, in practice this normally does not matter as the hotel does it for you--you just need to do it yourself if you're not in a hotel. It also lists financial document requirements that AFIAK are not expected of Americans.
- optimusprinceps 8y agoJust checked and it isn't accurate for citizens of Pakistan. For instance it says, "visa is required for Israel". Pakistan doesn't recognise Israel therefore they can't even apply for a visa.
- projectramo 8y agoBut I think people can still visit and have to obtain visas. The Israelis put and an extra page in the passport and stamp it. I know, I know, why and how is that possible? The ways of the world are strange. I just know Pakistanis who have visitors Israel.
- EliRivers 8y agoI think you've made a mistake there. Pakistan isn't in charge of deciding who can visit Israel. It's up to Israel to decide that. There are a number of accounts on the internet of Pakistani citizens asking Israel for a visa, and receiving one.
- 1hakr 8y agoThis is exactly why i want to add crowdsource info, so there is always the most accurate data from the community.
- hideo 8y agoThe website is accurate - a visa is required- but oversimplifying things. It's certainly possible, but it requires jumping through hoops. Essentially you have to "hop" through a third country.
- nnd 8y agoI recommend using Timatic, through one of the interfaces, like https://www.traveldoc.aero https://www.traveldoc.aero This is what industry professionals use to check if you are eligible to board a flight.
- 1hakr 8y agoYes but its very old UI and doesnt have any useful information like document checklist, visa application link, etc
- nnd 8y agoI agree, the only advantage of this site it up-to-date data and detailed requirements based on your travel itinerary and passport/residence. With visa requirements there are a lot of details involved, it's not as simple as nationality -> visa requirements mapping.
- ziont 8y agoIf you have a Republic of Korea or Singaporean passport, you can get into any country.
- raverbashing 8y agoI would be very careful with such statements because it's easy to miss a crucial detail. E.g. the limits of ESTA
- ziont 8y agohttps://www.passportindex.org/byRank.php https://www.passportindex.org/byRank.php
- 1hakr 8y agoI spent the last 6 months trying to build [Visalist](https://visalist.io https://visalist.io). Now your quest for tension free visa requirements research is over. Here's why I made this web app: A year back I became a digital nomad and started traveling. I wanted to visit all the countries that I fancied. Soon I realized that you need a visa to most of these countries, few have VOA(Visa on Arrival) and for others, you have to get it through their embassy in your home country(in my case India). So now I wanted to see the countries I could go without waiting for 3 weeks to get a visa, did some research. After few blogs and websites finally got the list. Traveled to a new country. After few months I wanted to go to another country. I had to do the same search, couldn't find the old one, found a new site which had more countries offering VOA. One of my friends told me that when he researching for Vietnam visa, he found almost 10 websites with .gov and it was really confusing. Many blogs don't have links to official websites of embassies. To summarize the problems: * No aggregated info of visa related info shown in a useful way. * Most of the existing blogs and website has very less info and are usually outdated. * Lot of research is needed even to go to a single country and this needs to be done every single time. * Difficult to find the official website and data on many websites is outdated. * Pay more than required money to visa agent's So I took the matter into my own hands and decided to aggregate this info, organize and present it in a useful way to the user and so VisaList was born. While I was talking to my friends about this, I realized many people wanted something similar from a long time. So what this has is * A simple way to find the basic requirements for all the countries you want to travel * Simplified visa requirements like visa-free, visa on arrival, visa not required, evisa, visa required and visa refused (Yes! For North Korea) * A simple map color-coded with visa requirements across the world so you can easily see which countries around you can easily travel to * Visa Requirement details like duration, documents checklist and other requirements for the stay * Which is the official website for that information I coded, designed and built Visa List using VueJS with NuxtJS for the frontend, MySQL for backend using Golang. I was originally an android developer and learned these just to build Visa List. I believe every person who wants to explore the world around them and would have faced the problem I faced, so could find value in what I have built. So I would love to know what you think of this and would be more than happy to hear your suggestions and feature requests. Let me know what you want to be added or removed or do I need to build something entirely! Thanks
- hackerm0nkey 8y agohttps://www.iatatravelcentre.com https://www.iatatravelcentre.com is my goto when it comes to visas. Not sure though if they provide this data over an API. and I heard that this is what airlines usually use.
- fergbrain 8y agoHow is this different/better than using your country’s equivalent to Department of State site to check, e.g. https://travel.state.gov/content/travel.html https://travel.state.gov/content/travel.html ?
- 1hakr 8y agoSo except few countries, most of the other countries dont have these sites. Even these sites point to the offical website of the traveling country. More over the visa application link, fee link, document checklist are not present. Visalist tries to aggreate all this information and show it an simple and useful way.
- Grazester 8y agoI just took a quick look but this doesn't tell me what countries I need a visa to visit and a non us citizen.
- golemotron 8y agoI use travisa for visas. Their website has the visa requirements for all countries free of charge.
- 1hakr 8y agoVisalist is also completely free
- mb_72 8y agoThere are spelling errors on each page I've looked at so far (eg travel "Iternary"). Personally I'd never trust such a site; I'd rather rely on my own research of visa conditions direct from official sources for the couples of times a year I need such information. If you can somehow increase the trustworthiness of your site, this might change.
- 1hakr 8y agoApologies for the typo, corrected it. Currently there are offical website links, visa application link and fee links along with document checklist. You can always cross check with the official site. As next step, i'm planning to add crowdsource validation, so the data is most accurate and upto date.
- hk__2 8y agoSpeaking of typos, there’s one on your personal website: https://1hakr.com/ https://1hakr.com/ "Currenctly" -> "Currently". Also I’m not a native speaker, but "Find countries to travel" sounds weird to me. Shouldn’t that be "Find countries to travel to"?
- hideo 8y agoIf you plan to crowdsource information, please make it abundantly clear that the info is crowdsourced, and maybe even make it slightly harder to get! There is a lot of inaccurate information about visas. Part of the problem is that border agents in most countries have A LOT of discretion in who is not allowed in, even if the laws explicitly say otherwise. To a lesser extent, they also make exceptions in the other direction (I've been granted a visa-on-arrival for a country that did not allow people with my passport to get visas on arrival :). Folks often mistake their personal experience as "the law", which is often wrong.
- nzealand 8y agoSmall note: New Zealand is not part of Australia, and has eGates not Smart Gates.
- fareesh 8y agoI personally would never use a website like this because I am not going to trust my precious travel plans and legal standing in another country to a non-authoritative website. For my personal comfort, the problem to be solved is officially recognized information presented in a convenient way. In fact, I have noticed that websites like this tend to add to my confusion when they contradict the official forms.
- 1hakr 8y agoActually the information is from the official website, infact in the details page you can find link to the offical website. What i'm trying to do here is simplify the visa requirements for everyone.
- stelonix 8y agoI disagree with the GP comment, something like this is exactly what I needed about a month ago, due to possibly needing political asylum. Speaking of which, I'll take the time to suggest you, if you can, to add information whether a given country is a signatory of the 1967 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Thank you for the great work!
- s0rce 8y agoI was also concerned about a similar issue so I selected my home country and a random visiting country that required a visa. The site indicates the source is wikipedia https://visalist.io/central-african-republic/visa-requirements/canada https://visalist.io/central-african-republic/visa-requiremen... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Canadian_citizens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Canadian... Results for USA citizens is similar (citing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_American_citizens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_American...) while the presentation is different the source isn't exactly official.
- 1hakr 8y agoCorrect but Wikipedia is not the only source, I have manually gone to every government website and gathered the document checklist!
- djhworld 8y agoThe time zone offsets are incorrect For example if I put "United Kingdom" as my home country, it says Ireland is 8-6 hours ahead.
- guessmyname 8y agoEvery page I’ve visited says: > The [country] passport holders can visit 193 countries with different visa Check Vietnam, for example: https://visalist.io/vietnam/all-visas https://visalist.io/vietnam/all-visas
- 1hakr 8y agoMost of the major countries information is available out of 201 countries
- forthwall 8y agoSuper cool! I'd suggest for when you're on the page that shows you the list of countries -> fix everything besides the list, so when you scroll down all the menus and context stay in view.
- 1hakr 8y agoNice suggestion. Thanks!
- runxel 8y agoLooks nice! Sadly some countries like USA doesn't have any information currently on your site, you might want to improve that. ;)
- html5web 8y agoUzbekistan has E-visa for all countries. Also, it has visa free for 5 days option if you are using a transit.
- priitmaxx 8y agoTurks and Caicos missing. Very good resource if it is complete.
- riantogo 8y agoImpressive. I tested it for a case where Visa was required except for some edge case. And indeed the exception (which applies to me) was shown prominently in a "tips" card.
- 1hakr 8y agoAwesome. Glad its useful.
- donohoe 8y agoFeature Request: Ability to provide more than one passport (for us dual-citizens)
- 1hakr 8y agoPoint noted. Thanks!
- hideo 8y agoIncredibly useful website. I have a few suggestions but please don't take this as negative criticism! I travel a fair bit and having these things would make this website my "one stop shop" for travel needs! * The ability to export a list of results into CSV or something else that I can import into a spreadsheet. I tend to make travel plans on spreadsheets, and this would be very helpful. * Scrolling to the left or right makes the colours disappear? I think this may be an OSM limitation but it really confused me. * Is there a way I can filter on multiple categories? I'd like to look at visa-free and visa-on-arrival in the same map. * This may be personal preference, but the emoji are really distracting. * The region filter doesn't seem to influence the subregion filter? If I select "Asia" as a region I assumed the sub-regions list would reflect only the sub-regions of Asia but that doesn't seem to be true * If I can subscribe to visa status *changes* for my country by email I'd give up my email address immediately. I'd probably be willing to pay money for this if it's accurate :)* The fact that this is non-authoritative doesn't bother me at all. You may want to highlight this a bit more "strongly". Maybe give up some of that priceless above-the-fold real-estate just to save yourself any legal trouble. * Consider linking to traveldoc.aero as well. * Several people I know and work/travel with have multiple passports from countries that allow it. Consider allowing the multiple home countries!
- 1hakr 8y agoThis is extremely useful feedback. 1. I understand, there isnt a plan as data keeps changing. i will see what i can do 2. Go it. 3. I'm thinking of adding it. 4 :) 5 Yes, it should. I just wanted to keep it dumb in the begining. Will change that. 6 Interesting 7 I will 8 Yes this is the most requested feature, i will build it soon. Again thanks a lot for the wonderful feedback.
- Jedd 8y agoOne oddness - home country is AU, attempting to determine status for Croatia. On the map it comes up as visa-free. Filtering 'croatia' shows it as visa-free. But even after scrolling all the way to the bottom, Croatia only shows up as as one of the languages spoken in Montenegro and Bosnia & Herzegovina. Might be a browser artefact - I'm on Chrome - and/or after-effect of page load, but it's not ideal. (It's always faster to type ctrl-f than to mouse-navigate to on-page search / filter dialogs.)
- dorian-graph 8y ago> Australia is part of Australia and New Zealand, Oceania with capital at Canberra. Somewhat concerning to have a mistake of this type on a website like this—or I'm just behind in the news.
- 1hakr 8y agoSo the format is <country> part of <sub region>, <region> woth cpaital at <captial>
- chrisseaton 8y agoWhat do you think the typo is there?
- crumbshot 8y agoA non-authoritative source of information that is riddled with adverts. No thank you.
- uwagan 8y agonice, but it would be so useful to display for how many days u can stay visa free in a visa-free country.
- 1hakr 8y agoThanks, I will be adding that soon
- reikonomusha 8y agoI find many of the critical comments to be shortsighted, especially those talking about trust/credibility. Do people really believe folks will check this site then run over to book an international ticket straight after? This is an awesome site to get a general idea where I (or my friends & family) can and can’t travel with and without extra work. It has a nice interface, a good collection of information, and is easier to browse than, say, Wikipedia on mobile. If I’m actually interested in locking down and going on a trip to somewhere where I may possibly need a visa, of course I’ll do additional due diligence with the embassy, which the site often helpfully links. “1HaKr in the corner reminds people of hackers and may turn people away.” Really?
- shaklee3 8y agoIf it's trying to be an "official" site, then yes. I think it looks great, and those small things are easy to fix to not deter people.
- diminoten 8y agoI have a completely evidence-free theory that, over time, the average sentiment score of comments on HN has gone down. Maybe I'm succumbing to bias with this theory (hello Eternal September), but it seems like all I read on "Show HN" anymore is negativity and dismissiveness. I really ought to try and do the analysis. I think it wouldn't be hard (HN is very good about keeping historical data, and sentiment analysis looks as easy as importing a library and passing it a dataset), just time consuming.
- wenc 8y agoI don't know. To me, HN is a place where ideas are workshopped. If one is looking for accolades, Reddit might be a better forum. I don't think I have any trouble with critical sentiments as long as they are correctly critical. Of course, too often they are not because some HN folks have an ax to grind, and to make things worse, they are misinformed because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing (pseudointellectuals). [1] But at the same time, if people are not critically examining ideas, that almost defeats the purpose of this place. I've seen some really bad and incorrect ideas on Show HN that are given a pass due to lack of expertise and discernment on the commenters' parts. Criticism, when done with civility with the intention to build up rather than tear down, can be a wonderful thing. Also, despite its purported negativity, people still dip their toe in the comments sections from time to time, holding out hope for finding the one or two gems. For all its flaws, there's no other general forum on the Internet (that I know of) that congregates this level of intellectual ability mixed with technical expertise. (specialized forums notwithstanding) [1] https://danluu.com/hn-comments/ https://danluu.com/hn-comments/
- datpuz 8y agoCool! If I were more bored, I'd be interested to see how correlated these two data points are: GDP per capita, number of countries that allow no visa or visa on arrival Just playing with the input, I suspect there would be a strong correlation.
- mattlondon 8y agoSuggestion: The green colours picked for "visa free" and "visa on arrival" is very close. I would recommend that you change the colours to be more obviously different. I personally found it a bit difficult to tell the difference between green and slightly-darker-green. Otherwise, very nice apart from the funky scrolling glitching up all over the place.
- iiioooiiiooo 8y agoFeature request: Show visa-free destinations of intersection of two or more citizenships: Eg French and Ukrainian couple can only travel visa-free to a few places together. Which are these places? Otherwise well done!
- _xzxj 8y agoNice site. This isn't the first visa site like it i've seen, but they all focus on travel visas it seems. I suppose that's the low-hanging fruit. What would be interesting to see are work visas, entrepreneur/freelance visas, working holiday visas, and so on. Obviously a much more complicated ask but that is what I have not yet seen from a site. Main reason being this: If you want to travel somewhere you can pretty much go on government websites (either yours or theirs) and see what the visa requirements are. If you're looking to relocate to another country but perhaps don't have a good idea where you want to (or can) relocate to or how, it can be a steep hill to climb. Having something with a bit of a hint as to where to start looking would be nice for people I think.
- scrollaway 8y agoAlso on HN a while back: https://multinational.io/ https://multinational.io/ I like it a lot because it lets you compare passports, which helps a bunch when planning travels/moves with someone else. Edit: Ah yes, https://passportindex.org https://passportindex.org also lets you do that, I remember using it, it's probably the most featureful of the lot.
- patja 8y agoTough problem, but it seems incomplete without covering long term visas for example 6 months
- mlacks 8y agoOver this project - while interesting and excellently executed - I use passportindex.org [0]. I can't validate its sources directly, but its backed by Arton Capital, which after a few minutes of research seems to have a pretty decent reputation in this field. Its also been validated by some respectable sources: WSJ, CNN, MSN, WaPo, HuffPo, and more [1]. [0] https://www.passportindex.org/byRank.php https://www.passportindex.org/byRank.php [1] https://www.passportindex.org/about.php https://www.passportindex.org/about.php
- hkolk 8y agoI noticed Hong Kong is missing (one of the SAR's in China). They have specific visa rules compared to mainland China Overall pretty useful site!
- LouisSayers 8y agoNice one! It'd be really cool to be able to sort by Visa length as well. That'd be a handy feature for digital nomads. You could solve any issues with info being out of date by sourcing from the community, allowing people to flag or comment on specific pages. Also, it's useful in the nomad community to know how easy it is to do visa runs etc as well, so that's perhaps some insider info - maybe you could put this behind a paywall.
- legostormtroopr 8y agoI'm helping with a conference and this would be massively useful... except I need to define there relationship by the destination country, not the origin. Can this show me all of the conditions for people wanting to visit a country?
- jpatokal 8y agoWikipedia's "Visa policy of X" articles should hit the spot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_policy_of_Thailand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_policy_of_Thailand
- eatbitseveryday 8y agoOther sites that provide this: https://multinational.io https://multinational.io https://passportindex.org https://passportindex.org Given the amount of work needed to maintain this information in useful detail, perhaps a site could ask for $X (maybe less than 10) per lookup for a given nationality to a given country, then use that to have a lawyer or someone keep the data accurate.
- QuantumToaster 8y agoThere are some missing entries. e.g. Travel from Australia to Taiwan
- Tunabrain 8y agoChecked for my home country (Switzerland), and it doesn't seem to be correct - travel to Canada requires an eTA, but the site lists Canada as being visa free. Could get you in for an unpleasant surprise when your airline won't let you board (they check for eTA at check-in).
- purpleidea 8y agoThe most helpful addition to this site would be a list of biometrics that the country collects. Eg: fingerprints, photo on arrival, etc... That way we can avoid the fascist, fingerprint hoarding countries!
- mricordeau 8y agoCorrection : For Canada from most Europe Schengen countries you need an Eta visa, it’s not visa free. Same for US green card holders.
- desdiv 8y agoSorry, but this is incorrect. The European Travel Information and Authorisation System has not even been developed yet, much less deployed. It will only come online in 2021. Until then, Schengen is visa-free for Canadians and Americans. >On July 5th, the European Parliament has given its final agreement to implement the European Travel Information and Authorisation System, ETIAS. European authorities have decided to establish the electronic visa waiver system in the year 2021 to improve security across the Schengen Area. https://www.etiasvisa.com/etias-news/how-will-the-etias-system-work https://www.etiasvisa.com/etias-news/how-will-the-etias-syst...
- mricordeau 8y agoI'm talking about the opposite way: FROM Schengen Europe countries TO Canada. My first comment was not really clear to be honest.
- desdiv 8y agoMy apologies, I misread.
- worldexplorer 8y agoAdding a reference source in requirements details might be helpful and assuring.
- rmlibby 8y agoNice map work.
- Torakfirenze 8y agoLooks like it drew a lot of inspiration from Pieter Levels' stuff. Nice work :)
- Bonge 8y agoWhen I entered a search for my country, the site informed me that the search input is my home country. I am currently not in my home country. This is also my first time using the site. What background information is the site using to identify this?
- akuji1993 8y agoI'm in Germany and France shows up as 11 to 11 hours behind me. That's not quite right, just wanted to let you know that something about the time differences seems fishy.
- ElCampesino 8y agoSearched from Canada and Brazil was not listed at all. Tried also from US and not listed. Tried from Brazil and Canada not listed.
- shopables 8y agoThis is great one stop solution to check visa requirements. Great idea. Hope it will grow.