The Absurd Obstacles Russians Erect for Tourists Serve to Highlight Challenges to Tourism to the U.S.

On the Travel Show that my daughter and I present each weekend, we recently interviewed a prominent blogger about the difficulty of obtaining a visa for travel to Russia. She is Chris Gray Faust, who appears on Frommers.com as well as her own blog ( www.chrisaroundtheworld.com ), and she provided us with more horrifying facts about that task than anyone could possibly imagine. She recently organized a trip to Russia, and "most" of her clients, she reports, succeeded in obtaining a visa for the trip. Imagine: several would-be travelers to Russia were unable to fulfill the complicated requirements in time.
 
The Russians require, first, that you complete a lengthy questionnaire online, in which you not only provide every conceivable genealogical fact (your parents' birthplaces, the birthplaces of your siblings and others), but also a complete, lifelong work history including the names of your supervisors at every company at which you've been employed. (You must also name all countries you have visited over the past 10 years.) All in all, it takes from 45 minutes to an hour to answer all questions, provided you're able to dredge up the material for doing so.
 
Thereafter, you must present the Russians with proof that you are fully covered by medical insurance for the time you will be in their country, and if your current policy doesn't cover overseas travel, you must take out a supplemental policy that does.
 
And then you must obtain and supply a Letter of Invitation from the hotels at which you will be staying or the tour operator you will be using. All of this must then be mailed, accompanied by your actual Passport, which you must give up for the period of time that will be required (at least two weeks) for the process to be completed. If you're not willing to trust that document to the mails, then you must physically visit one of the five Russian consulates in the U.S., each of which maintains different hours for meeting with applicants for a visa.
 
It's a nightmare, but it's not much worse than what the U.S. puts potential visitors through in order to get vaction in the U.S. Unless they belong to one of the few countries where the visa requirement is waived (mostly in western Europe), applicants for travel to the U.S. must undergo an actual live interview with a U.S. consular official. If they live in Bahia or Recife, Brazil, for instance, they must travel over a thousand miles to the city of Brasilia to undergo such an interview. Tales are also told of backlogs as great as 100 days in the time it takes to process most applications for a U.S. visa. Such backlogs are normal in the three major countries -- Brazil, China, and India -- from which we could be enjoying large amounts of tourism if the visa process weren't so difficult.
 
Recently, in advance of a trip that I have planned to Brazil, I learned that a visa for travel there now costs $140 per person and takes upwards of a month to obtain. Why? Because the proud Brazilians are wisely retaliating for the $140 fee and lengthy backlogs that we impose on Brazilians hoping to visit the United States.
 
Congress recently established an agency to promote incoming tourism to the U.S., an entity now called Brand USA ( www.discoveramerica.com ), which will have an initial budget (obtained from private sources, not from the federal government) of about $100 million, most of which will be spent on advertising the country's attractions. If some of that money were spent instead on hiring 200 or so additional persons to speed up the issuance of visas in Brazil, China, and India, the appropriation would result in far more tourism to the U.S. than advertising will. I now see that we need to review the ill-considered policies of attracting tourists to the U.S. before we start making Russian bureaucracy look efficient. Our failure to ease the process robs us of millions of potential tourists, hundreds of thousands of potential tourism-related jobs, and billions of dollars of revenue.