That Korean Visa Conundrum
The autumn months in Korea usually bring in lots of Filipino travellers, specially the month of December when families get to have common schedules for work and school breaks and have their extended bonding travels.
But a growing issue with the snowball pace is the processing of visas to Korea. For starters, the Pinoys have always been adaptive to the visa challenges, not just for Korea, but for many other countries. They wanted the travellers to line up early? The Pinoys were already by the gates as early as 2:00 A.M.! Well, that was in just the recent past, and things settled down when visa processing was made through third parties such as accredited travel agencies with direct access to the Korean Embassy.
It was going smoothly, until…. well…. the system could not cope with the increasing demand, again…
This time, from the usual one or two weeks of visa processing, the length of time has been steady increasing to 30 days…. then… 45…and some have even reported that the accredited agencies would require 60 days processing. This has been affecting so many travel plans of Pinoys who have marked their December calendars, and now have to cancel or delay their trips to Korea.
The express service does not help much as each agency is given some sort of a daily quota for the number of visa applications they send.
Of course, things will start easing up as the Korean embassy is quite fast in adjusting their system (well, really fast compared to another country we all know). But until that system is in place, the Pinoys will have to adapt to the system.
So if you have plans to visit Korea in one or two months and you haven’t applied for your visa yet, better start booking your grab car and zip your way to an accredited travel agency, or start editing those calendar markers.
You can also check the blog - Are You Planning to Visit Korea? - Then Read This First
READ THIS! - There are news that South Korea may allow 5-days visa free stay for Pinoy group tours in the mainland, provided that their final destination is Jeju Island. This should be good news who marked both the mainland and jeju in their bucket list! We will provide the update when we get the details.
