1. Do Your Research. I first check the IATA service center for visa rules, forms that
may need to be filled out (most often a health form) and when Covid was an issue, the vaccination or test requirements. Often a hotel reservation or exit flight is required . Booking.com is very useful here as accommodation reservations can usually be cancelled for free up to a day or two before your flight (however read the hotel reservation carefully). If you are uncertain of how long you are staying in a country, fake flights that use actual flights and look very realistic can be obtained at several fake flight websites, often for a fee. Look up available flights online first. The IATA site is the website checked by airline check in counters. It is virtually always up to date. There are usually links to the visa website and health forms.
Sometimes it is also recommended to look up the actual visa rules of a country on their website. However you must get past all the visa companies that advertise their services. Avoid these as they are almost always unnecessary, expensive, require sending away your passport and can use up a lot of time. They sell their product even when VOA or an evisa is availbable.
Determine if you need a single-entry, double-entry or mulitple-entry visa.
Immigration rules are in a constant state of flux. No visa requirements are obviously the easiest. Visa on Arrival (VOA) may become unavailable (or available), and this is just about always the easiest visa to navigate. E-visas are used by many countries but can be very onerous to complete easily. The have many questions and may require files of certian types and sizes. I have all my travel documents resized in one folder (passport cover, passport bio page, passport sized photo, covid vaccination record) which is easy to do with a Word document. Avoid the websites for resizing as most have a fee and are often difficult to know exactly what size you need.
PDF’s can also be signed in Preview with a set signature that can be resized. This avoids the onerous process of printing, signing, scanning and emailing documents that require signing.
When I entered Ethiopia for the first time, they had discontinued their VOA and instituted an evisa. The official website did not state this. I arrived for my flight and was denied boarding, lost my flight, spent three days in the Istanbul Airport, finally gave up and went to Egypt instead.
When I went to Iraq the second time and was entering at the Basra airport, the IATA site stated that a reservation at two specific hotels for seven days was required (a completely crazy rule). Our guide said this was a scam and not to worry. This rule existed only for Basra. However, when I tried to check in with Qatar Airlines at the Cairo airport, they enforced the rule. Neither of the hotels had a website or could be booked on any website (like Booking.com), I was denied boarding and lost the entire tour and airline ticket. Complaining to Qatar Airlines only got “You should have checked the rules.” The three women on my tour all flew on Emirates who didn’t enforce the rule.
2. Control Your Passport. If left to the immigration officer’s whim, they will always stamp an empty page, quickly leaving you with many pages with few stamps and none for full-page visas. This is especially important if traveling to many countries on one trip.
I find the best way to prevent this is to use a paper clip to clip together all the empty last pages of my passport. Then politely ask the officer to stamp in a particular place, showing the page and the exact place to put the stamp. Explain that you are going to many countries and need to have open pages. Male officers are much more likely to comply.
I can often get 8-9 stamps on a page.
3. Make sure the visa stamp is dated. Sometimes the officer forgets this step, then you must prove when you entered the country. This happened on my second trip to Indonesia and I had thrown out the receipt and boarding pass of my flight. My only proof was a record of the flight on my phone and the stamp from the preceding country. I almost missed my flight.
4. Make sure the duration of the visa is correct. Once in Bangladesh, expecting the officer to date it for the duration of the visa (30 days in this case), she asked me how long I was staying in the country. I guessed 12 days and that is what she put for the duration of the visa!!! I left on day 13 and had overstayed my visa. What a mess. I avoided a fine by whining a lot.
5. Fraud. This is something least expected but happened to me once when entering Turkey from Bulgaria over a land border. I was told to park and taken to a distant booth where I paid the $50 visa fee and given a receipt. Back at the exit booth, a woman wearing a hijab put a stamp (that ended up being indecipherable) in my passport despite the visa being a paste-in small pink rectangular visa. The three people involved in the fraud were all obviously working together in a scam they had done before. They pocketed the $50 when there was no record to the proper visa being given. When I exited Turkey, I had no visa and because of language difficulties, could not convince the officer what had happened. He finally gave up and let me exit the country.