Egypt Travelogue-4:Visa and Travel

Indian citizens need to get an Egyptian tourist VISA to travel to Egypt. You don't get a visa until you book your tickets and attach a copy of it with the visa form. But it is not necessary that you will definitely get the VISA which means you will have to cancel the ticket and and bear the cancellation charges., if you don't get the visa. We have to just take our chances and be ready to loose some money if the unfortunate thing happens.

Non Indian citizens can checkout this site for details on Visa.

Tickets

As of now (March 2009) Oman Air is the only airline that has direct flights from bangalore to Cairo, capital of Egypt.There are also other airlines like Egypt Air and Air India that fly from Mumbai. Oman airways worked out to be the cheapest for us and we went ahead with it. There is a change over in muscat, but overall it is quite comfortable.

We planned to book the tickets through oman airways site in the internet. But we came to know from my brother-in-law that an agent in Delhi was quoting a much lesser price than the internet. We booked the tickets through the agent about two months ahead of our travel date.

Flight Details

Airline: Oman Air
Destination: Bangalore to Cairo and back(stop over at muscat)
Cost of the flight tickets(to and fro for 2 of us): Rs  56000(almost half of our entire trip cost)
This is November 2008 prices.

Visa

Indian citizens residing in India can get Egyptian visa from the Egyptian consulate in Mumbai or Egyptian Embassy in Delhi.One good thing about getting Egyptian Visa is, we need not go in person to get the visa. So we submitted all the relevant documents to a travel agent and got the visa through him.

We got our VISA through Charter Travels and Tours. The only reason I chose them was because their office was very near to mine. Their service was quite OK.

Its better to call them (or any other agent) first and find out the documents that have to be submitted to them to get the visa. We applied for visa around two weeks before our travel. I think its better to get the visa a month ahead to avoid uncertainity.

The following are the documents that we gave them

1.  Filled VISA form(I downloaded it from here, the agent will help you in filling the form)
2.  Passport
3.  1 passport size photo with light background
4.  Confirmed air tickets
5.  Hotel booking
6.  Cover letter
7.  Salary slip for the past 3 months
8.  Leave letter from the company
9.  Last year's filed IT return
10. Credit card copy
11. Brief Itinerary

The agent gave us a call after 3 days to collect our passports stamped with Egyptian toursit visa valid for 3 months. I was overjoyed to collect the passports that officially stated that we are elligible to travel to the land of pharoahs.

To be continued...