On 18 July 2014 09:20, Ruth Suehle <rsuehle@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi, all. It's too late to solve this for this year, but I'm hoping to crowdsource some answers for next year.

We have booked flights for people based on the itineraries they requested, in some cases on the assumption that they knew better than we did how best to get to Prague from their own countries and deal with getting visas.

Because some countries require you to (or at least strongly suggest that you do) have a flight before you request a visa, we are now quite over budget for travel due to denied and delayed visas requiring us to rebook flights on different itineraries. It's not only India, although because we have many contributors who want to attend Flock from India, it's the primary problem country in this situation.

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?

Heh, those of us who worked for the US government had to deal with paperwork and procedures written before this 'no Visa needed' became popular in the 1980s? :). [Which explains why I asked months ago because I hadn't dealt with it.] In general, we were asked to find out if we needed a visa, file a preliminary flight, then go through the process of getting a visa (or similar paperwork for people who have a clearance and are travelling overseas), get the visa, then file a permanent travel. Since visas took 3-6 months to get (according to the paperwork clearly dating from the 1960s ) we needed to plan 6-9 months in advance and budget extra for flight rebookings.

With it being that my training was from a decade before I was born, I don't know how relevant it is still today.

Thanks!
Ruth

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Stephen J Smoogen.