The Department of Immigration acting director, Amelia Komaisavai shared that there have been new and emerging tourist markets for Fiji. Ms Komaisavai said the exempted countries were Fiji’s traditional tourism markets.
Non-exempted countries have to apply for a tourist visa before they come to Fiji. She highlighted that in the last few months there was an increase of non-exempted countries coming back into the tourism market choosing Fiji as their tourism destination again since the border reopened.
“This year we are catching up very fast so we have researched and by December we probably will beat the pre-COVID trends,” she said.
“In terms of how the trend is going right now we are noticing a very fast movement of tourism where our tourism arrivals coming from non-exempted countries and these are mostly Sri-Lankan, the UAE (United Arab Emirates) have joined us in the tourism arrival.
“The Fiji embassy in UAE is actually working with travel agents and tourism operators there to get those tourists across and we are also working closely with the embassy on this emerging new tourist market for Fiji.”
In 2019, the top 10 non-exempted countries included Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Pakistan, Croatia, Nepal, Iran, Timor-Leste, Honduras and Ecuador. In 2022, the top 10 non-exempted countries include Myanmar, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Croatia, Pakistan, Nepal, Honduras, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Challenges she added that some of the processing challenges that were coming from these non-exempted countries were the mandatory requirement for Fiji which was still a COVID certificate.
“We found that it took time for them to achieve in submitting that certificate so that delays the processing of their application for visa with Fiji,” Ms Komaisavai added.
She said they also failed to provide some important requirements. Online Ms Komaisavai mentioned that the Department of Immigration was also working towards having an online system.
“We are working towards an online system that’s still with our Government tender boards so we hope they’re going to finalize the vendor for that online particular project we are working out,” she said.
“We hope to have that up and running by next year so we continue to resource our permit departments that are doing permit processing that’s what we are doing internally.”
Story By: nicolette.chambers@fijisun.com.fj
