Visa Requirements for Egypt

Like many countries, Egypt requires an entry visa to enter the country. The requirement to get a visa is pretty simple and straight forward. Your passport needs to be valid for at least six months. If you follow the advice of most guide books, the easiest and cheapest way to get your visa is at your entry point into the country. For most of us that will be the Cairo International Airport. For most travelers, this will be a painless process and one that only costs about $15.

What bothers me are the emails I've received lately from both my airline of choice and my booking agent encouraging purchasing my visa in advance. In some countries and at certain historical times, obtaining a visa in advance of your travels was required. Back in the mid to late 80s, I remember going up to Montreal to get visas for France. Due to security threats, France required you have a visa obtained from one of their consulates or embassies in advance of your travel. It, too, was a pretty stratight forward process and since Montreal was just an hour away, I chose to do it in person instead of sending my passport off to NYC.  Plus, it gave me an excuse to eat lunch in the city (always a pleasant occasion).

There are also those countries that require you to fill out a tourist card application (almost always on the airplane just before landing) that gets processed as you go through customs. In Mexico, for example, it's an easy process to get your tourist card/visa for a full 180 days even if you're only going to be there for a week's vacation in Cancun. For this, there is no fee. Although I do have an objection to a visa with a fee attached (just a state sanctioned form of a tourist tax), we'll same that discussion for a later blog.

My objection with the airlines and travel services is that they're implying that I need to get my Egypt visa in advance or as they put it, to make my travels easier. Interesting, there is a significant fee associated with this service. In addition to paying the visa fee itself ($15), I also have to pay a service fee of approximately $45. I'm also asked to provided two passport quality photos (interestingly, I don't need these at the airport when I arrive to get my visa) which will cost an additional $10-12 (note: if you're a AAA member, go there for cheap, high quality passport-type photos for only $3). All told, I'm going to end up paying nearly $70 for this visa.

As the old saying goes, the proof of the pudding is in its eating. Having entered a number of foreign countries, I've never encounter any out of the ordinary procedures getting through customs. I'll let you know later whether we have any difficulties in Cairo obtaining our tourist visas. Across the board, the guidebooks all consistently describe the entry process as easy. Just be aware of agencies offering an unnecessary service with a pretty hefty price tag.

In any case, VisaCenter may provide some good information for your future travels, but please do your homework and check out whether or not you need to pay for services that are otherwise easily obtained upon entry to your destination country.

Tomorrow: New Year's Resolution: Fly For Less!