Visas and Passports

by Thomas Flannigan, Chicago, IL

My wife, Nenko, and I took a 3-week trip to Romania, Moldova and Ukraine in September-October ’08. We hired excellent private guides in Romania and Moldova and enjoyed a 12-day cruise down the Dnieper River in Ukraine, which we booked through Value World Tours (800/795-1633, www.rivercruises.net).

ITN readers who often travel between Canada and the USA before continuing overseas might wish to invest $50 for a 5-year NEXUS (866/639-8726, www.nexus.gc.ca) border pass, which facilitates travel between those two countries.

My husband, Clyde, and I renewed our passports in June ’08. Then came the task of what to do about our 10-year India tourist visas in the expired passports.

My husband, Clyde, and I sent our passports to the National Passport Processing Center in Philadelphia for renewal on Friday, June 6, 2008. We used Express Mail and included an additional $14.85 for Express Mail for their return; we did not pay the additional $60 for expedited service.

The National Passport Information Center, or NPIC (877/487-2778), told us to expect the new passports in about four weeks. New passports were delivered to us on Saturday, June 14 — a turnaround time of less than a week!

I read about the reader’s experience with U.S. Immigration’s computers not being able to read a passport of someone whose first name is an initial (May ’08, pg. 11).

In reference to the letter titled “Initial Snag at Immigration” (May ’08, pg. 11), I offer comments on my experience having a passport that lists my first name only as an initial (W James Brasher).

My wife and I took a trip in January ’06 that included Brazil, and we got the necessary visas. In January ’08 we returned to Brazil and, while preparing for the trip, I was asked if we had ever been there before and when.

I looked up our old visas, still in my current passport, and noticed that they were good for five years if the initial entry into the country had been within 30 days of the effective date of the visa, so each of our visas was still valid and we saved $100 each.

On a trip my wife and I took to Europe in May ’07, we picked up a car at the Frankfurt airport that we had reserved over the Internet from National Car Rental. As always, I scrutinized the car carefully before signing the form that claimed it had no damage.