Visa News

New passports for Visa Waiver Travellers

If you are a citizen of one of 27 Visa Waiver Programme countries, and your passport was issued after October 26th this year, you must meet several new requirements of US embassy to travel to the USA.

Your passport should be machine-readable and must contain your digital photo. Passports issued after Oct 26th 2006 will also be asked to contain an integrated chip with information from the data page.

Countries issuing passports that do not meet VWP requirements will be removed from the programme and their citizens will have to obtain visas to travel to the US.

VWP travellers whose MRPs were issued before this date may continue to use their passports, for VWP travel, until expiry.

The Visa Waiver Program (VWP) enables nationals of certain countries to travel to the United States for tourism or business for stays of 90 days or less without obtaining a visa. The list of countries in the programme includes the UK, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, Spain, Sweden, etc.

More information on VWP is available at http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/without/without_1990.html

Source: http://www.gulf-times.com