Visas – you need them but, oh man, can they be hard to figure out sometimes. When you’re travelling to a bunch of new countries it can quickly become confusing about what visa is needed where, which ones can be applied for online before you leave and which visas are easy to get at the border on arrival. Luckily, someone has created a website that will tell you EXACTLY which visa to apply for, and we’re so glad this feature finally exists.
Passport Index is a genius solution to the commonly asked question, “do I need a visa to visit that country?”. How it works is simple. You just plug in the country of the passport you hold and it will populate a list of every single country in the world and it’s visa requirements for someone with your passport.
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If you have dual citizenship and therefore more than one passport (for example, you might have an Australian one and a British one) you can add both passports into Passport Index to compare which one you should use to enter a country, thus avoiding having to buy a visa at all, or whether one of your passports means you’ll be automatically issued one on arrival. The filter will also tell you the terms of your visa, for example: a visa free for 90 days means you’ll have to apply for a visa formally if you plan to stay for longer than that period.
Image source:Passport Index
A couple of things worth remembering are that if you can get a visa automatically on arrival, you may need to bring a passport photo or a set amount of money in a certain currency. Sometimes this is the local currency and sometimes it’s US dollars. It’s also worth nothing that countries in the European Union have made visas much easier by having a joint visa for all the countries in the EU known as the Schengen Visa. This makes travel between smaller countries much simpler!
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The only caveat is that Passport Index is an independent website and not run by official government bodies or consulates, so there’s no guarantee all the information is kept up to date. While it’s a great place to start, we’d highly recommend triple checking it against an official embassy website.
Image source:Passport Index
