A woman has warned fellow Australians hoping to avoid long queues on arrival in Bali not to make the same costly visa mistake she paid the price for.
Visa on arrival forms allow travelers entering the island of Indonesia to avoid immigration queues and save time when completing travel documents upon arrival.
Australian tourist Laura Davy filled out one of these forms, but realised she had made a mistake when filling out the online form.
It cost him an uncomfortable wait at Balinese customs and a $50 fee.
Ms Davy told Daily Mail Australia the experience was “very disappointing” but vowed not to do it again.
She said an airport official told her she could not leave the arrivals terminal after landing because of her visa.
Ms Davy thought she could breeze through immigration at Denpasar airport, but she found herself stuck.
“The automatic gates that scan passports weren’t working for me, probably because they detected an error in my visa, so I had to enter and go through customs manually,” he recalled.
Australian tourist Laura Davy revealed that her entry to Bali was delayed due to a small error on her visa
A customs officer stopped her because she had problems with missing letters that appeared before the series of numbers on the top right of her passport.
“When (the customs man) was checking my details to make sure they were 110 per cent correct, he said to me: ‘You have to pay another $50 because you entered your passport number wrong,'” Ms Davy explained. in a TikTok video.
“I said, ‘No, I didn’t. I put all the numbers in correctly.’ He said, ‘You missed the first two letters.'”
His passport has the letters “PA” followed by numbers, he said.
“All my life I thought ‘PA’ stood for passport number,” he explained.
“I thought, ‘Why would I include them?'” she questioned in the video.
“They made me pay another $50. I paid $100 for 30 days. That’s a big life lesson for me.
‘If you are paying for your visa in advance, please enter all your details 100 percent correctly.’
Ms Davy told the Daily Mail Australia that other Australians had experienced similar dramas at the airport but had gotten a different outcome.
“Other people have messaged me saying that some people had their incorrect details changed on the spot and they didn’t have to pay the extra $50,” she said.
“We landed at 10:20 p.m., so I guess the guards were in a bad mood and didn’t bother to help me,” he joked.
‘Very disappointing but I won’t do it again!’
Nearly 860,000 Australians visited the Indonesian island between January and July 2024
However, it has been reported that Indonesia will waive the $50 visa fee for Australians and a limited group of other nations from October.
The island nation is set to scrap the fee in an effort to boost its struggling tourism industry
Australians will still need to apply for a visa allowing a 30-day visit, extendable to 60 days.
The visa fee was largely unpopular with Australian travellers after it was reinstated following the Covid pandemic.
A financial expert said Yahoo The fees could deter large families from travelling to the idyllic resort island.
“In the context of spending thousands of dollars on an overseas holiday, a $50 visa alone for a single traveller is probably not enough to deter someone from going to Bali,” said Finder’s Sarah Megginson.
“But if you travel with your family, this cost becomes quite significant.”
Laura Davy urges Australians to check their visa details before travelling
Despite the exemption, Australians travelling to Bali will still have to pay a $15 tourist tax introduced earlier this year to tackle overtourism in the province.
Indonesia aims for tourism revenues of $18 billion by 2024.
The Henley Passport Index ranks the Australian passport relatively high for overall travel freedom, although Singapore takes the top spot.
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