List of transit visa requirements

score:7

Accepted answer

The only global resource I know of that’s more or less up to date is Timatic, which is the database used by the airlines to determine requirements to allow boarding, under the auspices of IATA.

There are public user interfaces through some airlines or via the IATA Travel Centre, but as far as I know programmatic access requires a subscription, no idea about the fees for that.

Note that while the inputs are standardised (passenger nationality, documents, destination and transit countries, dates of travel, etc.), the output is not, given all the gazillion cases, exceptions, exceptions to exceptions, etc. Just for transit, the answer for a specific passenger nationality/country of transit combination can range from a single paragraph to multiple pages. While a lot of that information uses similar formats, there are tons of exceptions.

Timatic is also not foolproof, there have been errors in the past.

It’s actually very difficult to completely automate the task except for the simplest cases (I.e. you are likely to reject many options that are actually possible — though better that way than the other way around).

Don’t forget that this changes extremely often, sometimes at very short notice, and that new non-standard requirements can be added at any time (as we’ve seen a lot since the start of the Covid pandemic).

Make sure you do not give the impression to your users that an itinerary you suggest is guaranteed to be doable in their specific situation. That will get you in trouble. There is a reason nobody seriously tries to do this and deflects the responsibility on the passenger to look up the information themselves.

Another alternative, but with a lot more caveats, is Wikipedia, which have lots of pages titled “Visa Policy of XXX” and “Visa requirements for XXX citizens”. The advantage is that it’s free and you can probably easily download the data, but:

  • I have no idea if all countries are covered
  • It is less standard and more difficult to parse accurately
  • It is probably not as up to date, though Wikipedia editors are always astonishing (but that may depend a lot on the country involved).

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