I should currently be in the United States but today but I’m here stuck in Brisbane, why? Because I made a stupid (but entirely avoidable) mistake and in the end, has caused me to completely cancel my itinerary. Am I happy about doing so? No, but I’ll never, ever make this mistake again…
As an Australia citizen on an Australian passport, we have to apply for an ESTA visa for travel to the United States. The process is simple and often is completed within a few days of applying for new passports and for renewals, it’s often completed within a couple of minutes.
I booked this trip about 5 days ago and only had finished putting the full itinerary on Saturday, I was extremely excited not only to be on the retirement flight of VH-OJU but also was going to reviewing a range of products I haven’t yet looked at on the blog.
Here I am on Saturday night packing for my trip and it hits me all of a sudden, have I got an ESTA for the US? uh oh. This is where things went downhill pretty quick.
I had received a new passport a few months ago and when I did so, I obtained a couple of visas for various countries as I had upcoming travel.
But was the United States one of the countries I had applied for? Nope….
This put me in a very difficult situation. I immediately tried to apply my new passport for an ESTA and not so patiently waited and refreshed my internet browser for some time.
I had both fingers crossed that it’d arrive within a few minutes but unfortunately, that wasn’t the case this time.
I wonder if my interesting travel history would have anything to do with it?
What about the whole purpose of the trip?
The whole idea of the trip was the 747 flight and I was most upset about not being able to be on that, I was very much looking forward to being onboard. Because I missed it, I’m going to do one of the domestic runs as well as an international flight. I’d also love to be on the absolute final flight which will take place sometime next year.
Overall
If there is one thing that I hope this post can do, it is to make sure aware that these things shouldn’t be left last minute, because this is a perfect example of what can happen when organising can go wrong.
The U.S and Australian governments also need to hurry up with their Global Entry trials…
6 comments
Ugh, sorry about that! My wife asked me why I applied for our Australian “ESTAs” last month when we’re not due to fly until January. I told her “because if anything goes wrong I want months to fix it instead of days or hours.” I should forward her this article.
Good luck next time!
“The U.S and Australian governments also need to hurry up with their Global Entry trials…”
Maybe you mentioned this as an entirely separate topic, but even if you have GE you still need to apply for an ESTA
You IDIOT! ….. just kidding. Mistakes happen to the best of us. But I bet you never do it again.
So sorry. When I visited Australia from the US over a decade ago, I found out about the visa requirement when the boarding pass printed out and had noted a requirement. I was in a panic and called the airline which offered a service for applying. At the airport, another passenger who had pre-applied had to pay again! I was lucky and got processed. Good luck to all travelers out there.
The subsequent time I learn a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as a lot as this one. I mean, I know it was my option to read, however I truly thought youd have something attention-grabbing to say. All I hear is a bunch of whining about something that you may fix in the event you werent too busy searching for attention.
You spent the time to comment negatively and complain about attention seeming? Hypocrisy is a funny thing 🙂
You obviously have no idea how a blog works.
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