Dubai (UAE) Visa for Nepalese Citizens

Almost every long journey out of Kathmandu passes through the Gulf somewhere along the way, and for a lot of Nepalese travellers Dubai is the city where that happens — sometimes only a few hours inside the terminal, sometimes a few days out in the city because the onward flight worked out cheaper that way. Whether Dubai is where you are going or simply where you change planes and step outside, the starting point does not move: Nepal does not appear on the UAE's visa-free list, and a Nepalese passport needs an approved visa before departure.

A large share of the Nepalese applications we handle are not sent to us by the person who is travelling. A daughter in Doha arranges a trip for her mother in Pokhara. A brother in Kuala Lumpur fills in a form for a father who has never used one. That works perfectly well here: what we need is the traveller's passport page, their photograph and their dates — not the traveller sitting at a screen — and we will put our questions to whichever phone is answering them.

Timing is the part worth thinking about ahead of time. Around Dashain and Tihar, and right through the wedding months, a great many people are moving at once and every piece of a trip takes a little more organising than usual. Nothing about the way we work changes in those weeks, but the sensible margin does: start earlier than you otherwise would, so that a document we have to hand back to you still leaves room before your flight.

What we return most often on Nepalese files is a photograph of the passport page taken with the phone's flash switched on. The light bounces straight off the laminate and swallows a line of print, usually the line carrying the number or the expiry. Switch the flash off, lay the passport flat under a window or a lamp, and shoot it square on instead of at an angle — that is nearly always enough. Somebody on our team looks at every scan before anything is submitted, which is how these get caught while there is still time to take another one.