Awkward $50 passport mistake sees Aussie stopped at Bali border: 'Big life lesson'
The Aussie woman encouraged other travellers not to make the same mistake with the visa-on-arrival form, which cost her extra for her stay in Bali.
Aussies travelling to Bali might have heard of a clever way to skip the long line on arrival by pre-purchasing their entry visa before they go. But one woman has warned not to make the same awkward mistake she did when completing the online form, which meant she was made to pay an additional $50 at the airport on arrival.
Travellers can complete a visa on arrival (VoA) form ahead of time, so you "don't have to line up and can walk straight through" immigration. So Aussie woman Laura Davy did just that, however when trying to enter the popular destination she soon learned a simple passport fact she had wrong.
"When he [the man at the airport] was checking my details [on the form] 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'," she explained in a video on TikTok this week.
"I was like, 'No, I haven't. I put all the numbers in correctly. He was like, 'You've missed the two front letters'."
Davy is referring to the two letters listed before the numbers on the top right corner of Aussie passports. These letters are different for most people and are used to create a generate a unique number. For her, it's "PA", she said.
"All my life, I thought that 'PA' meant passport number," she embarrassingly explained. "I was like, 'Why would I have to include them?'" she questioned in the video.
"They made me pay another 50 bucks. 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."
Bali visa on arrival to be scrapped for Aussies
While Aussies are required to pay for a visa currently, Indonesia is set to waive the controversial $50 Visa-on-Arrival (VoA) tourist fee for Australians and many other visitors from October. The VoA was scrapped in 2016, resulting in record arrivals to Bali from Australia, but was reinstated after Covid. More than seven million tourists are expected to visit Bali in 2024.
Speaking to Yahoo News Australia previously, personal finance expert at Finder, Sarah Megginson, said the $50 fee, while on its own is not excessive, it can quickly add up for larger families.
"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," she told Yahoo. "But if you're travelling as a family this fee becomes pretty significant."
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