No credit for huge visa fees

The publication date of this issue of The Southern Cross coincides with my sister’s birthday. She turns 70 this year and will probably do me grievous bodily harm for making this milestone public.

In mitigation, I hasten to add that she does look or behave as though she is 70, but still seems to have that same vim, vigour and radiant beauty she had when she was in her early twenties.

The reason I raise the subject of my sister’s birthday is not to abuse my position as author of this weekly column by engaging in nepotism, but rather to talk about travel and tourism. It’s something my sister has always loved and in which she indulges herself enough times in the year to earn her the title of chief family jet-setter.

Having children in far flung and exotic places makes her jet-setting extremely affordable because they keep offering her free flights and accommodation in exchange for some token baby-sitting. A cushy arrangement and pertinent to my point, because I am beginning to feel that international travel is now so expensive that it is becoming the domain of only the super-wealthy and baby-sitting sisters. The rest of us have to make do with a weekend in Brakpan.

It is strange indeed that it has become so expensive, because air travel is actually a lot cheaper, relatively speaking, than it was 20 or 30 years ago.

I did a calculation a while back and found out that if the price of air fares between South Africa and Europe, for example, had increased at the same rate as local new car prices since 1970, it  would now cost in the region of R100000 for the cheapest economy-class return airfare.

So where on earth is the expense of travel today?

Firstly, I suppose it is in the rate of exchange between the South African rand and the dollar, euro, pound and yen. Essentially by trading rands for euros for example, every taxi, every hotel room, every sandwich, every cold drink and every museum admission ticket is horrendously expensive. But even people living in Europe complain that these things are very expensive for them.

What really irks me though, is the subject of visas. I fully understand why the likes of the Australians, Americans and now the British demand visas from South Africans. Apparently our Department of Home Affairs has made a great mess of things in recent years. There are literally thousands of fake South African passports in circulation.

I am told that in Britain alone there are at least 35000 false South African passports, the majority of which are being used by people who are not South African, who have never been to South Africa but who managed to pay the price for a false passport and use it to gain entry into Britain.

The part that irritates me is not only the cost of these visas, but the principle of being charged for a visa. Travelling to the United States will cost R1250 in visa fees; to Britain, around about R1000. And if you happen to want to visit Europe and decide to fly via London, in addition to spending roughly R1000 on a dreaded Schengen visa, you’ll have to spend about R500 for a British transit visa, even though you are not entering Britain but just changing planes at Heathrow airport.

The insanity of this transit visa is that because one is not entering Britain there are no immigration facilities at Heathrow for transit passengers, which means there is no-one to actually look at your passport.

I question visa fees, not only in terms of their high cost, but because they are completely illogical.

Right now, because of the global recession, world tourism is on the decline. This means that more and more countries are having to try harder and harder to persuade tourists to visit them instead of going somewhere else, in exactly the same way as shops and shopping centres are battling to entice customers.

Now imagine how you would feel if you arrived at your local shopping centre and someone at the door insisted that you paid a R50 entrance fee? My bet is that very few of us would bother. It would be seen to be utterly ridiculous. It would be bad marketing, and an equally bad business practice.

But that is exactly what countries are doing. By charging for visas they are effectively charging an entrance fee. Which is almost as bad as those Catholic churches in Italy charging visiting Catholics admission fees.

My birthday present to my sister will be to pray for mortal sins to be apportioned to anyone who charges for entry to a church or country.