Letters: Visa-on-arrival at Soekarno-Hatta

Tue, 05/12/2009 2:02 PM | Reader's Forum

If Indonesia is serious about wanting to attract more tourists and investors, wouldn't it be a good idea to improve the visa-on-arrival system at Soekarno-Hatta airport?

The current system is frankly very annoying to visitors, and gives an unfortunate first impression of the country. And we all know how important first impressions are!

This is how the system currently works:

The visitor goes first to a payment booth, queues up, and pays the visa fee to a cashier.

The cashier issues a receipt. Next, the visitor goes to the next-door booth to submit his passport together with the receipt to an Immigration officer.

The Immigration officer scans the passport, prints out a visa, carefully glues it into the passport, and hands it back. The visitor then has to queue up again at passport control.

At passport control, a second immigration officer inspects the passport, checks that the visa is in the passport, and stamps the passport.

In other words, the visa which the first officer sticks in to the passport is inspected by the second one just a short distance away - and is then never used again. To make matters worse, each visa takes up a whole page of the passport.

This means that people who might otherwise make frequent visits (such as high-spending tourists, prospective investors, or businessmen looking to source supplies in Indonesia) are put off from doing so, simply because they don't want to have to renew their passports before they expire.

So why not simplify the whole process by just having the visitor pay the cashier, take the receipt and hand it over to the officer at the passport control desk (which in fact is more or less what is already done at Denpasar airport and at the Bintan ferry terminal)? That way, a lot of time would be saved, passport pages wouldn't be wasted and the first impression of the country would be positive instead of negative.

Even better, why not set up a system for visitors to pay for their visas on arrival together with their airline tickets, before they even arrive in Indonesia? Then they would only have to queue once after landing - just as they do in most other countries!

Oliver Wright
Singapore