India to Issue Visas upon Arrival starting October
Starting October of 2014 Russians will be getting Indian visas upon arrival to the country. Recently the Indian government has altered the country’s entry regulations for citizens of 180 countries, including Russia.
It will take about six months to create the necessary infrastructure. Only eight countries are not covered by the new visa regulations, among them Pakistan, China and Sri Lanka.
Tatyana Vand, general director of ‘Vand International Tour’, believes that streamlining the visa regime will benefit India in terms of inbound tourism, which can grow 15%.
“Indian Consulate’s work is intermittent and quite unreliable: it can take them from 5 to 10 days to issue a visa,” she told TRN magazine. “The new visa issuing procedure will eliminate this uncertainty.”
General Director of “Pegas Touristik” Anna Podgornaya believes that Goa’s inbound tourist flow can grow 20% thanks to tourists who buy last-minute tours.
The company ‘OM-tour’ does not predict a significant rise in Russian tourist flow to India.
“Those who make up their mind to visit India will not be hampered by visa issues, they will just go anyway. Maybe streamlining the visa regime will give those tourists who prefer to spend their holidays in Goa an additional incentive to visit the region. Our company organizes tours throughout the entirety of India, so we would like to know for sure whether all the airports of the country will issue visas,” says OM-tour’s General Director Inessa Kartintseva.
Lately there have been a growing number of assaults on Russian tourists and travel company employees in India. Also, our travelers are taken advantage of by fraudulent companies.
Inessa Kartintseva believes this problem to be connected with commercial policies of large Russian tour operators and with Russian tourists’ ignorance of local laws and customs.
“Our major tour operators usually retain full control over the whole scope of travel services, they have their own guides and transport. It is no secret that India is struggling with high unemployment, and such policies exclude local population from the chain of travel services. This is a sure-fire recipe for conflict. When doing business in India, you need to take into account local laws, regulations, customs, and settle differences through negotiations. Also, tour operators often neglect to inform tourists of the country’s behavioral norms, when it is a completely different culture that needs to be respected, which is what the majority of our fellow countrymen fail to do,” she says.