Cruising overseas? Don’t forget to factor in the visa fees

Question: We signed up on Oceania for a cruise to India and the east coast of Africa. We subsequently got a bill for $716 per person for visa fees for four countries — India (where we will spend five days), Kenya (10 hours), Tanzania (nine hours) and Mozambique (eight hours). We were told that all the visas were necessary and that we would not be allowed onboard without them, even if we chose not to go ashore at those countries. I do not mind paying a reasonable amount for a service, but these charges seem exorbitant. It feels as though the cruise line did little for our $1,432. Is it possible that this is common practice in the cruise industry?

R. Huber

Glendale

Answer: Huber has stumbled on one of those unanticipated costs that, as travelers, we sometimes forget to calculate, and that’s visa charges.

A visa is the official OK for you to enter a country. Some countries don’t require them for U.S. citizens; others do. Obtaining a visa can be complicated by whether there is an issuing consulate or embassy in your area, by bureaucratic snarls, by user error (instructions must be followed exactly) and by a host of other factors.

A good starting point for figuring out what you need is the State Department’s website, travel.state.gov, but don’t click on “U.S. visas” — that’s for people coming to this country. Instead, enter the country or area you wish to visit under “Learn about your destination” and click “Go.”

Let’s take a look at India, the first place on the trip. On the State Department site, go to “Entry, Exit and Visa Requirements.” .

“Indian visa regulations change frequently, often with little advance notice, and changes may be poorly advertised and inconsistently enforced,” the website says. “Travelers are urged to check the website of the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C., before any travel to India to review the most current information.”

When I began researching this story, the next paragraph directed the reader to the Indian government’s visa contractor. That link was incorrect; indeed, the visa provider had changed. (The error has since been corrected.) The new contractor, Cox & Kings Global Services, took over from its predecessor in May.

The transition, apparently, was not smooth.

“People traveling to India from the U.S. are wading through a bureaucratic nightmare when applying for documents to get overseas,” a Wall Street Journal blog reported in June. Travelers encountered delays that meant having to cancel trips, it said.

The newspaper pointed to “inadequate software, a backlog from the last company and overall mismanagement.” The visa contractor’s offices in New York and San Francisco were swamped. The San Francisco Examiner reported online in late May that fights had broken out at the San Francisco office. (That’s where Southern California visa applications are processed because there is no L.A. office.)

Huber reported that, for India alone, “the cruise company sent us an email with 13 pages of instructions, including an application to the visa company, a several-page visa personal information form, instructions to send our original passports, passport copies and passport pictures to the visa company. Completing the package took several hours.”

And that, readers, is just India. Multiply that by the number of countries you’ll be visiting and your investment of time and money will grow accordingly.

Ken Ripoll, owner of AllStar Passports & Visas in Los Angeles, calculated the visa fees and his company’s fees for Huber’s trip at $1,140, which did not include the cost of mail service.

Both Ripoll and Carolyn Spencer Brown, editor of CruiseCritic.com, think the cruise line’s total includes a markup, which is not unusual, they said.

In an email, an Oceania spokesman noted the cruise line’s charge: “Our fee covers the cost of the visa itself, charges from third-party providers and an administration fee to Oceania Cruises.” Based on Ripoll’s estimate, that administration fee is about $282 and maybe less, because Ripoll did not calculate shipping costs.

Oceania added, “The dollar amount for this service is conveyed to the guest in advance and either placed on their cruise invoice or shipboard account.”

You can circumvent these costs by taking on the task and acting as your own visa agent. But the advantage almost always goes to professional companies, because they can backstop you.

“If there’s a problem, [the visa service] would know right away and get supporting documents and get it done,” said Ripoll. I happened to interview him the morning a client, leaving that evening, still had not received the required Indian visa. It was delivered in time.

The choice is yours, of course. But if you have thousands invested in a vacation whose “go” or “no” rests on having all documents in order, you want someone in your corner instead of having to go two falls out of three with a bureaucracy whose red tape threatens to entangle — and possibly sink — your trip.

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