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As airlines grow and transportation infrastructure takes hold, the single biggest obstacle to capitalising on all this hardware will be the software — visa policies. For years, many Asia-Pacific governments have allowed visa-free access to Europeans, Americans, Australians, Japanese and other citizens of industrialised countries. Now, they are totally confused on how to handle the future travellers from China, India, Russia and other countries within the region.
Each of these countries have problems with illegal immigrants, crime syndicates and other undesirables that governments want to keep out. However, they also want to ensure that genuine tourists, business travellers, convention delegates and visiting friends and relatives traffic gets fair and easy access. How these visa issues are sorted out, especially in view of continuing security concerns and the ‘war on terror’, is going to be a major challenge in future.
Indeed, visa issues were among the top items for discussion by ASEAN tourism ministers at their meeting in Vientiane, Laos, in early February 2004. They expressed frustration with growing confusion in the region’s visa policies which they feel is impeding the overall goal to facilitate seamless travel by ASEAN citizens within the region and holding up plans for a single visa for travel to ASEAN, based on a standard set of application forms and paperwork requirements.
ASEAN has dozens of sea, air and overland border checkpoints through which visitors can travel. Although ASEAN heads of state signed a landmark tourism agreement last November 2002 declaring in principle a desire to create a visa-free zone for ASEAN citizens by 2005, the declaration has made little progress.
In fact, on February 1, Indonesia reinstated a visa policy, slashing the number of visa-free markets from 48 to 11, with some of the remaining 37 countries becoming eligible for visa on arrival (with payment). This reinstatement has been a long, difficult and controversial process as various government departments struggled with details of which nationalities should require visas, how much they should be charged and at which international checkpoints they should be available. Meanwhile, Malaysia is pushing for the electronic ‘MyKad’ card which is used to travel between Singapore and Malaysia, to be expanded throughout the ASEAN region.
Theodore is the Co-Founder and Managing Editor of TravelDailyNews Media Network; his responsibilities include business development and planning for TravelDailyNews long-term opportunities.
