A woman has warned fellow Aussies looking to dodge long queues upon arrival in Bali to not make the same costly mistake on her visa that she did.
Visa on arrival forms allow travellers entering the Indonesian island to skip immigration queues and save time completing travel documents on their way in.
Aussie tourist Laura Davy filled out one such form, but made a mistake while filling out her passport details.
It cost her an awkward wait in Balinese customs and a $50 fee.
Ms Davy told Daily Mail Australia the ordeal was ‘very disappointing’ but vowed to never do it again.
She said an airport official told her she couldn’t exit the arrivals terminal after she landed because of her visa.
Ms Davy thought she’d be able to breeze through the immigrations process at Denpasar Airport – but was mistaken.
‘The automated gates that scan your passports weren’t working for me – probably because it picked up on my visa error – so I had to manually enter and go through customs,’ she recalled.
Australian tourist Laura Davy revealed her entry to Bali was delayed by a small mistake in her visa
She was stopped by a customs official, who had issues with missing letters listed before the series of numbers in the top right of her passport.
‘When (the man at customs) was checking my details to make sure they were 110 per cent correct, he was like, “You’ve got to go pay another $50 because you’ve put in your passport number wrong”,’ Ms Davy explained in a TikTok video.
‘I was like, “No, I haven’t. I put all the numbers in correctly”. He was like, “You’ve missed the two front letters”.’
Her passport features the letters ‘PA’ followed by the numerals, she said.
‘All my life, I thought that ‘PA’ meant passport number,’ she explained.
‘I was like, “Why would I have to include them?”,’ she questioned in the video.
‘They made me pay another $50. I paid $100 for 30 days. That’s a big life lesson for me.
‘If you’re prepaying for your visa, put in all your details 100 per cent correctly.’
Ms Davy told the Daily Mail Australia other Aussies had experienced similar dramas in the airport but got a different result.
‘Other people have messaged me saying that some people had their incorrect details changed for them on the spot and didn’t have to pay the extra $50,’ she said.
‘We landed at 10.20pm so I assume the guards were just cranky and couldn’t be bothered helping me,’ she joked.
‘Very disappointing but I won’t do it again!’
Nearly 860,000 Australians visited the Indonesian island between January and July, 2024
Indonesia looks set to waive the $50 visa fee for Australians and a limited group of other nations from October.
The island nation is expected to scrap the fee in an effort to boost their struggling tourism industry
Australians will still need to apply for a visa allowing a 30-day visit, extendable to 60 days.
The visa fee was largely unpopular with Australian travellers after it was reinstated following the Covid pandemic.
A financial expert told Yahoo the fees could deter larger families from travelling to the idyllic tourist island.
‘In the context of spending thousands of dollars on an overseas holiday, a $50 visa in itself for a single traveller is probably not enough to deter someone from going to Bali,’ Finder’s Sarah Megginson said.
‘But if you’re travelling as a family this fee becomes pretty significant.’
Laura Davy urges Aussies check their details on visas while travelling
Despite the waiver, Australians traveling to Bali will still need to pay a $15 tourism tax introduced earlier this year to address over-tourism in the province.
Indonesia is targeting $18 billion in tourism revenue in 2024.
The Henley Passport Index ranks the Australian passport relatively high for global travel freedom, though Singapore has the top position.