On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 8:50 PM, Ruth Suehle <rsuehle(a)gmail.com> wrote:
As those of us doing the flight bookings are American and rarely need visas
where we travel, this is unfamiliar territory. Can those of you who deal
with visa problems make any suggestions about how to avoid this next year?
Or is it simply unavoidable, and we need to budget in the equivalent of
several extra people's flights for these rebookings?
I am going to give my own example and try to get some points.
I am an Indian, that means I need visa for almost all the countries in
the world
and practically none of the countries we visit for conferences will
give electronic
visa or visa on arrival.
I was supposed to be in PyCon AU on 31st July and fly from there to Prague for
Flock, after I received my flock tickets I applied for Czech visa
which took much longer
and that means I can not receive my AU visa( as both the confs
confirmed tickets at almost
same time, I applied for flock visa first). PyCon reimburses the
ticket after I reach there, that means my 1.5k USD is gone
as the tickets were non-refundable.
Now the only way to make this easier are:
1. Buy flight tickets more than 2 months in advance and make sure
people apply for visa asap
after that.
2. If the conference is in US, it might be easier to get in as
USA/CANADA gives visa for longer
time (10 years).
Another pain point for a person from India is to show a good bank
balance for the visa approval. That
is one big reason for visa denial. Or else the invitation letter
should make it very prominent that all costs
will be taken care by the conference organizers.
Kushal
--
CPython Core Developer
http://fedoraproject.org
http://kushaldas.in