Turkey Launches an Online Visa Application System for 94 Countries

Ankara announced today that it launches an online visa application system that will allow people to obtain the Turkey Visa in only a few minutes. Of course, there are certain conditions in which tourists can obtain so rapidly the visa. However, the system is open for 94 countries.

“Around 30 million foreigners visit Turkey each year. 65 percent of them are exempted from visa. Our target is the remaining 10 million foreigners. They are allowed to enter into Turkey after they get their visa from our consulates or at the border gates. This system is designed to transfer all of these procedures to the electronic context,” Deputy Foreign Minister Naci Koru told the Hürriyet Daily News in an interview on April 23. As the architect of this system, Koru is well known for his expertise in digitalizing many functions of the ministry.

“We want more people, more businessmen, and more tourists to visit Turkey. We want to reinforce our multidimensional foreign policy. Our interest is not limited to countries in our immediate neighborhood. We want to open up to the peoples of the Far East, South America, Africa… because we want to support our economic, political opening up to these regions by easing travel conditions of the people of these regions,” Koru stressed.

The countries are separated into two gropus. People from the 40 countries in the first group, that includes the United States, Canada, Australia, Austria, Greek Cyprus, Qatar, Norway, the United Kingdom, etc. will get visa without any conditions. However, for the tourists from the other 54 countries there are some conditions.

People who obtain visa from an OECD country will have no problems in getting their Turkey touristic visas in no time, as well as those having a residence permit from an OECD country.

“In these countries, there are businessmen and other circles that are travelling frequently around the world. We want to issue visas easily to them. But how to identify them? We have set owning a valid visa from an OECD country as criteria. In the past, obtaining a Turkish visa was very hard for them. Now it’s easy and fully electronic. The system started on April 17 and is functioning very efficiently,” he explained.

People from India and Pakistan will also enjoy the benefits of the new system.

In order to get the Turkey touristic visa online, all those interested have to access www.evisa.gov.tr in order to make their online application. After entering the required information and making the payment by credit card, the visa is issued, theoretically in no more than three minutes.

“Among today’s applications, the shortest is one minute and 13 seconds. The average is around three minutes. We estimate that we’ll issue more than 3,000 visas in one day in the coming months,” Koru said.

In today’s high competition among contries in attracting tourists, and in a time when many people want to solve as much as possible online and fast, it is important to meet people’s needsand Turkey seems to be doing a great job with this new system.