A Kenyan built website that helps you plan your travels in terms of Visa Requirements for whichever passport you may hold is now live. Visarequirements.site is a website with Visa data for over 199 Passports that helps you know the different things required of you when traveling to different countries depending on the passport(s) you hold.
So say you have a Tanzanian passport, and you want to travel to Estonia. Normally, you’ll need to check what is required of you in Estonia. Like are you allowed free entry? Will you get a visa on arrival? Do you need to apply early on? Or is there an e-visa?
To get such information you’ll need to either visit the Estonian immigration website, or the Estonian Embassy in Tanzania -if there’s one – to know for sure.
It’ll even be harder once you know what flights you’ll be using, and if the various countries you’ll be laying over have any extra requirements.
Well, Okii Eli, whose Twitter handle is @nextstevejob decided to build a website that makes it easier for everyone in the world to know what they’ll need when traveling to a new country.
Reaching out via email, he says he spent over two months building the site after having to “search several websites (to find) information on visa-free countries” as he was planning a possible holiday to a visa friendly country.
“Some of the information was copy-pasted and it was really confusing. Many blogs don’t have links to official websites of embassies,” he says. This led him to identify the following major issues with traveling:
- There’s no aggregated center for all visa-related information that’s designed in a useful, and simple interface for everyone to understand
- Most of the existing blogs and websites have very little info and are usually outdated
- There’s a lot of research needed when visiting a single country, especially for Africans. And this needs to be done every other time you’re travelling.
- It is difficult to find the official website. And a couple of times, you may find data on certain websites is outdated.
- As it is, many people find themselves needing to pay more than required money to visa agents, to get things right.
Visarequirements.site, Eli says, presents a couple of solutions to all the raised problems:
- The site offers a simple way to find the basic requirements for all the countries you want to travel to
- The site simplifies what you need to know to a couple of tabs: visa-free countries, visa on arrival ones, visa not required, evisa, visa required and visa refused ones.
- The site also offers additional information with details like duration, documents checklist and other requirements for the stay
- You’ll also get the the official website from which the information has been sourced.
Though a one-man team, the site looks pretty usable even though Eli says it is just version 1. For me, it is a quick way to discover which countries as Kenyan passport holder I can quickly go to without going through rigorous Visa applications. I believe with feedback from users, and critics, it will only get better. Check it out.
