Embassy officials said the change hange was made in an effort to create a more efficient visa application system.<\/p>\n
The new rules will become mandatory as of November 1, 2006 and are expected to speed up the process and alleviate the long lines and week-long wait that are common with the visa application process.<\/p>\n
“This is apart of a world initiative designed to increase efficiency of our non-immigrant visa process and also to improve the accuracy,” said US Ambassador John Rood yesterday.<\/p>\n
He said one of the reasons increased efficiency is so important is that the embassy is working towards making visas available the same day persons come in for interviews.<\/p>\n
Even though the online application is not mandatory as yet, more than 50 per cent of the individuals applying for non-immigrant visas in the Bahamas actually use the online services already.<\/p>\n
This process, Mr Rood explained, does not require persons to be computer literate, because online applications will be identical to the paper version that is presently in use.<\/p>\n
Another concern raised with this incoming system is the lack of Internet access on some of the smaller islands.<\/p>\n
However Mr Rood does not think that will be an obstacle. “In the Bahamas, you have a great system here with Internet access – quite a bit better than a lot of other areas in the world.<\/p>\n
“The very small communities that might be on an island, I know some people who live on Abaco, they’re going to have to get into Marsh Harbour and get into a terminal and sit down and fill out the application.”<\/p>\n
Mr Rood also explained that the new process would be much more user-friendly than the one in place now. “You won’t have people standing out in the sun or the rain waiting on long lines,” he said.<\/p>\n
Source: The Tribune<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The United States Embassy has announced that it will only accept electronic visa application forms in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10223285771444175_51037792744":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243583\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}