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Expanding the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) would bring increased economic opportunity to and improve national security in the United States while advancing U.S. public diplomacy around the world, said Roger J. Dow, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association.

Dow’s comments emerged from his testimony submitted today to the Committee on the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement.

“Since its creation in 1986, the VWP has been an invaluable instrument of U.S. national security and public diplomacy and is also critical to our nation’s economic health,” said Dow.

“It is difficult to exaggerate the benefits to the United States of reciprocal 90-day, visa-free travel with the 36 countries that currently qualify for visa waiver status,” Dow said.

The VWP program has provided its promised stimulus to the U.S. economy, Dow argues. In 2010, VWP countries were the largest source of inbound overseas travels to the United States, sending more than 17 million visitors or 65 percent of all visitors from overseas. While here, these visitors spent nearly $61 billion, supporting 433,000 American jobs along with $12 billion in payroll and generating $9 billion in tax revenues.

“The opportunities that would result from expanding the program to key emerging economies are staggering,” said Dow. “As the Subcommittee reviews the program, we urge you to reflect on these benefits to our foreign policy, homeland security and economy that comprised the original rationale for creating the Visa Waiver Program.”

U.S. Travel supports two pieces of legislation regarding the VWP currently before Congress: H.R. 959, introduced earlier this congressional session by Rep. Mike Quigley, and H.R. 3341, sponsored by Reps. Mazie Hirono and David Dreier.

Dow’s testimony was submitted in conjunction with the Dec. 7 committee hearing: “Visa Waiver Program Oversight: Risks and Benefits of the Program.”

Source: http://www.travelagentcentral.com

Visa fees for tourists heading to Japan’s three regions hit hardest by the March 11 tsunami, earthquake and nuclear disaster are to be waived for five years.

Overseas visitors heading to Miyagi, Iwate and Fukushima prefectures in Japan’s northeast will not have to pay visa fees from next week until November 2016 at the earliest.

The initiative, launched by the foreign ministry, aims to help attract visitors to the regions worst affected by the March 11 disaster and rebuild their tourism industries.

While 77,000 tourists visited the three regions during 2010, this year’s figures are significantly lower: tourism dropped nearly 88 per cent in Fukushima and 90 per cent in Iwate prefecture during the second quarter of this year alone, according to recent figures released by the Japan Tourism Agency.

Tourism in Tokyo also plummeted 71 per cent in Tokyo and 91 per cent in Yamanashi prefecture – home to the iconic Mount Fuji and 186 miles from the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant – during the same period.

As part of the new visa fee waiver programme, visitors who present documents to verify their visit to the affected prefectures, including travel itineraries or transport tickets, will be exempt from paying fees, which cost around £24 (3,000 yen) for single use or £48 (6,000 yen) for multiple use.

Visitors from China, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia are among nations which are normally required to have visas before entry and will be eligible for the fee waiver programme.

Meanwhile, the chairman of the western Japan branch of a volunteer organisation has been arrested on suspicion of embezzling Y10.9 million (£86,972) that had been donated to victims of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Yoshiharu Tsuji, who was also the president of a company that operated supermarkets in and around Osaka, has admitted transferring the money to his personal bank account, Kyodo News reported.

Source: Telegraph

South Korea entry visa is now free for Vietnamese tourists from Ho Chi Minh City flying direct to Korea’s Jeju Island, tourist officials announced Monday in the city.

Mr. La Quoc Khanh, vice director of the city Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism, and Mr. Oh Chang-Hyeon, marketing director of the Jeju Tourism Organization, gave an information session Monday night to announce their cooperation result right after their working sitting in the day time.

Two chartered flights per week on Tuesdays and Saturdays contracted by Korea-based company Asia World Travel now link the two destinations, with visa free for Vietnamese tourists, said Mr. Oh Chang-Hyeon.

The chartered flights, which started over the weekend, are already fully booked for the HCM City-Jeju direction until December, said Mr. Vo Binh, Vietnam branch manager of Asia World Travel. Boeing aircraft with more than 140 seats are used for the chartered flights, he said.

A round trip package tour to Jeju now costs about US$600-620 depending on two or three nights, and on tour operators, he added.

Mr. Oh Chang-Hyeon is leading a Jeju tourism promotion mission visiting Vietnam on Oct. 14-18 to sound out more opportunities. Besides Ho Chi Minh City, they have come to the Mekong Delta in the south. They have also met with representatives of Vietnamese tour operators.

Mr. Khanh, vice director of the HCM City Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism, said the two sides have agreed on some other activities to be conducted to lure more Korean tourists to the city and more Vietnamese visitors to Korea, especially Jeju Island.

About 10 Korean journalists joined the Jeju mission to make reporting and shooting on Vietnam, said James Shin from the Jeju Tourism Organization.

In May this year, the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism in cooperation with the Korean Cultural Centre in Vietnam launched a website for online votes for Ha Long Bay of Vietnam and Jeju Island to become one of the seven new World Natural Wonders.

Website www.jeju-halong.com is in three languages – Vietnamese, Korean and English – so that people in the two countries and others can easily vote for the two UNESCO-recognized natural heritage sites.

Switzerland-based organization New7Wonders is scheduled to announce the result of global voting for the seven new World Natural Wonders on November 11, 2011.

Source: http://www.saigon-gpdaily.com.vn

The U.S. visa processing time may be shortened to within 30 days, said a U.S. tourism official on Monday.

“The U.S. Senate just introduced a legislation last week to bring the waiting time (for a visa) to under 30 days,” Roger Dow, president and CEO of U.S. Travel Association (USTA), told Xinhua at an annual China-U.S. tourism leadership summit on Big Island, Hawaii.

“Specifically they are looking at China and taking a look at the feasibility of not having a face-to-face interview,” Dow said.

Shao Qiwei, chairman of China’s National Tourism Administration, said China and the United States are working together to improve the efficiency of visa issuance.

Since the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding in 2007 that aimed to bring more customers to the U.S. tourism industry by facilitating group leisure travel from China to the United States and permit U.S. destinations to market themselves in China, the two countries have seen significant growth in this market, Shao said.

The three-day summit opening Monday is designed to build business through creating relationships and knowledge of both the Chinese and U.S. markets.

Members of USTA and the China National Tourism Association, including more than 70 regional tourism officials from the United States and China, attended the meeting.

Source: Xinhua

Sri Lanka had withdrawn the on-arrival visa facility for 84 countries. So tourists from those countries will need a visa prior to arriving in Sri Lanka. The new system will be implemented from 30th September.

Foreigners visiting and traveling via Sri Lanka will be able to obtain visas through the website of the Department of Immigration and Emigration of Sri Lanka by personally applying for them. This system will be made compulsory for the tourists from those 84 countries from 2012 onward.

Sri Lanka has granted foreign tourists a 30-day visa on arrival since the 1970s as part of a move to promote tourism, but it was badly affected thereafter with the issues occurred in the country with the civil war. Last May, Sri Lanka scrapped the on-arrival visa facility given form Indian tourists. However, only tourists from Singapore and Maldives, countries which gives on-arrival visas to Lankans, will continue to get the reciprocal facility.

Source: Sinhalaya News

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A vast investigation by the Department of Homeland Security  of 1.6 million cases of foreigners suspected of remaining in the United States after their visas expired has shown that more than half of them have already left the country or obtained legal immigration status, officials told Congress on Tuesday.

Department officials put the remaining cases of foreigners who could still be in the country through an intensive electronic screening. About 2,000 of them were determined to be here and to pose a potential national security or public safety threat, they said.

After further investigation of that group, the department opened “several hundred” new investigations of the foreigners where there was evidence of substantial risk, the officials said. The department said its priority was to detect and prosecute those high-risk immigrants.

In two separate hearings, department officials reported the results of a review of all cases in the department’s files of foreigners suspected of overstaying their visas. The review was ordered in May by Secretary Janet Napolitano in advance of the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. The review yielded the first solid information about illegal immigrants in the country who first entered legally. Previously, officials relied on imprecise estimates.

John D. Cohen, a senior department official for counterterrorism, told a House Homeland Security subcommittee that after running all the cases in the backlog through databases of law enforcement, border security and intelligence agencies, officials had found that 843,000 of the possible visa violators had left the country or fixed their status.

The officials said the investigation showed that the Homeland Security Department had developed technology to track foreigners in the United States and determine if they had left when their visas expired. The new electronic search methods would greatly improve the ability to identify and punish those who overstay visas, they said.

Speaking before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Ms. Napolitano said the department was moving on a “fast track” to create a nationwide electronic exit system to determine when foreigners leave the country.

While security checks of arriving foreigners have sharply improved since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States still does not have any system for keeping track of when foreigners leave. Many Republicans and some Democrats in Congress have called on the Homeland Security Department to create an exit system based on biometric inspections of travelers as they leave through airports and land border crossing points. But Obama administration officials have argued such a system would be too complex and expensive to create.

“Officials are saying they are now going to be able to determine on a real-time basis who has overstayed visas,” said Edward Alden, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noting that the administration was making a clear shift away from the goal of a more cumbersome exit system.

Source: NY Times

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Traveling to Shanghai and other Yangtze River Delta cities may get easier for some tourists in the near future.

Shanghai Tourism Administration authorities announced last week that the city has proposed a new local visa policy to the central government.

The proposed policy will extend transit-visa stays in Shanghai from the current 48 hours to a longer period of time, said the Shanghai Daily.

The report didn’t specify how many visa-free hours a transit tourist would be allowed under the new policy.

Nor did it mention a possible approval date.

The new policy might allow transit travelers to travel further afield from Shanghai during their “transit” stays.

Local tourism authorities are appealing to Beijing to spread the policy to the entire Yangtze River Delta.

The idea behind the visa extensions is to “boost tourism and make the area more attractive to foreign travelers,” said Dao Shuming (道书明), the tourism administration director. “Integration of traffic connections in the Yangtze River Delta Region is improving quickly.

“In near future, it will take less than three hours to travel between any two cities in the area.”

A “travel ecosystem” in the Yangtze River Delta will be built as an affiliated service to the proposed policy.

The travel system will provide different service packages, including sightseeing, studying and entertainment services, with Shanghai, Nanjing (capital of Jiangsu Province) and Hangzhou (capital of Zhejiang Province) as the three core cities.

Currently, Shanghai allows 48-hour, visa-free stays to transit travelers from a number of countries — instead of the 24 hours allowed in most major Chinese cities.

According to the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United States, the special policy is offered to citizens from the following countries: Republic of Korea, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Austria, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland.

Travelers from those countries who can present valid passports and proper travel documentation can land at Pudong International Airport or Hongqiao Airport without an entry visa.

It is yet to be announced which nationalities the proposed policy will benefit.

Source: CNN Go

Brazil, long known for manufacturing airplanes, ethanol and a variety of other exportable products, has become a major player in the world economy, and its growth assures even greater importance in the future. Today, it’s officially the fifth largest economy in the world – surpassing France and Great Britain.

For South Florida, the consequences are significant. Some 550,000 Brazilians visited last year and spent an about $1 billion, a figure that will surely grow.

Why then did more than half a million people from one of the world’s soaring economies have to wait weeks to request travel visas to visit the United States? Because of an outdated policy that needs to be revisited.

Brazilians have proven that they should join the other 36 nations in the world that enjoy visa-waiver privileges. For one thing, fewer than 3 percent who come to the United States on tourist visas overstay. And with government figures that show that some 31 million people there joined the middle class in the past decade, that’s not likely to change. If anything, some Brazilians legally in the United States have been going back home to live.

They come here to shop and invest. We need to make it easier for that to happen, not harder.

Annual trade between South Florida and Brazil tops $13 billion. Brazilians are a big, positive influence on our tourism figures and our sagging luxury-condo market.

The U.S. travel industry, particularly in South Florida, is pushing hard to advocate the change. Experts estimate that if the visa requirement were waived, the number of Brazilians visiting here could double in a short time.

More visitors mean more jobs, particularly in South Florida, which would be the major regional beneficiary of any change that makes it easier for Brazilians to visit the United States.

With the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics fast approaching, allowing Brazil a visa waiver would likely benefit Americans who want to visit that country. It would encourage Brazil to lift the cumbersome burden that requires U.S. citizens to obtain a Brazilian visa before they go, a process that can entail hours of waiting – just as some Brazilians coming here have to undergo long waits.

In the fall, Congress will debate a new law that changes the rules on how to qualify for the U.S. Visa Waiver Program. Key points about passport security and counterterrorism cooperation will remain, and they should.

To qualify for a waiver, the law would have the Department of Homeland Security consider how many people from a country overstayed their visas. Any country with more than a 3 percent overstay rate wouldn’t meet the criteria. That makes more sense than the current policy of weighing how many people’s visa applications were denied.

The rule change wouldn’t just benefit Brazil. Poland, Romania, Chile, Panama and about five other nations would also enjoy visa-free travel under the proposed changes. As long as they meet Washington’s tough anti-terrorism security standards, they should.

The U.S. State Department is taking steps to address the deluge in Brazil: 20 consular positions were added, and about 8,000 people showed up on “Super Saturdays” to get visas. The number of tourist visas issued to Brazilians has more than doubled.

Those numbers prove the State Department measures aren’t enough. It’s time to recognize Brazil’s global prominence and make sure the South American powerhouse qualifies for visa waivers.

Source: Kansascity

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When it comes to relations between Ukraine and the European Union, one big issue in Kiev is the on-going controversy over EU travel visas.

Everyday Ukrainians line up outside the likes of the Polish and Czech embassies, hoping to get their hands on a bit of paper that gives them free movement in the Schengen zone. But many are hoping that one day all of that will change.

As part of an action plan with the European Union, Kiev is attempting to meet strict conditions for the lifting of EU visa requirements.

Outside the Czech embassy a man planning a third trip to Prague to visit family explained how proving the purpose of his visit was difficult the last time he applied.

“It is as if they thought I was going to stay there and work illegally,” he said.

Europe Without Barriers, an umbrella group of numerous NGOs, is helping to fight for an EU no-visa regime. It admits the government has work to do to improve border security and migration controls. However, it says theNGOs are also having to help tackle what it describes as stereotypical attitudes among some EU members.

“It is known that Ukraine has its supporters of visa liberalisation, but at the same time there are those who are afraid of it and those who are critical of it,” explained Iryna Sushko from Europe Without Barriers.

But before visas can be lifted the EU says real concerns about illegal migration, trafficking and false documents must be addressed.

It says Ukraine’s vast borders, especially to the east, are permeable, and trafficking and illegal migration from other countries pass through.

But is Brussels optimistic its conditions can be met?

“This is quite a comprehensive and complex situation. Ukraine has a lot to do in terms of implementing these requirements of the action plan. And therefore I think we should have this in mind. There have been some positive steps already taken,” said José Manuel Pinto Teixeira, EU Ambassador to Ukraine.

Whether those steps are enough remains to be seen though; a progress report from Brussels is due in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, local NGOs say they are monitoring attitudes and practices at EU embassies, saying the number of long-term and multi-entry visas are too low.

Seamus Kearney, reporting from Kiev for euronews says: “Many travellers also complain that success in obtaining an EU visa largely depends on each individual embassy – and they say the approach is far from uniform.”

However, the European Union says it has attempted to make the whole process more transparent, simpler and cheaper for Ukrainians. It also says the rate of visa refusals at EU embassies is now down to about four percent.

Among those dreaming of an end to the long wait for visas are foreign companies operating in Ukraine. Two employees from the logistics company GEFCO outlined the difficulties.

“Very often a truck that carries goods can remain idle for up to three weeks while the transport company waits to get a visa for its driver,” explained Igor Loskutov, the company’s Road Transport Coordinator.

Aleksandr Levchenko, Purchase and Quality Manager at GEFCO said: “Business is very dynamic and it rapidly changes, and the need to travel sometimes happens at the last minute.”

It is a message Ukrainian politicians are only too aware of, as they continue to try to boost border security with practical and financial help from Brussels.

Source: Euronews

AFGHANS hoping to embark on a grand tour of Europe, or any other continent in fact, are likely to find their wanderlust curtailed by immigration officials. According to an index compiled annually by Henley & Partners, a law firm, natives of Kabul, Baghdad and Mogadishu are required to fill in visa applications for more countries than anyone else. Scandinavians and Finns, by contrast, can travel to 173 countries or territories (out of a possible 223) without the need to fill in forms with curious questions dreamt up by bureaucrats.

Source: The Economist