We wanted to share our experience about visas for Kenya and Tanzania, to help others avoid the stress that we experienced. While we did receive a little bit of guidance from our tour company, we still experienced some hiccups that caused quite a bit of worry. We’ve completed a dozen or so visa applications over the years, and these two, far and away, were the two most difficult we’ve ever encountered.

Kenya’s was pretty straight forward, though long. They want to know every place you are staying while in country, so have all of your lodging information ready. They also have some interesting file size requirements that you just have to deal with. The challenge comes at the end, when you have to pay. After you provide a Visa or MC number, there is a convoluted approval process, that requires you to go to your credit card statement and find a code, then enter it in. None in our group were able to get this right the first attempt. Eventually we got it right, and thankfully, we received notification that our visa had been granted, within a couple days.

For Tanzania, our application was actually rejected the first time. No explanation, no kiss my grits. We immediately sent an email to the address provided, asking what we did wrong, and got no response after a week of waiting. Marshall then jumped on Gemini.ai and learned that the most common mistake that Americans make on the Tanzania visa application is that we choose the wrong visa type. There are four choices, one of which is a one-time visit for $30, which we had chosen. Seemed pretty straight forward to us. However, it seems that Americans, and Americans only, must choose the multi-visit visa for $100, regardless of whether you are visiting one time or not. Wait what? We can only assume that Americans are being assessed the higher visa cost, due to the fact that the US government has recently targeted Tanzania, and many other African nations, with a crazy $10K bond that must be posted to visit the US, on top of a ridiculous $435 visa application fee. So, we suspect this is payback, and we don’t blame them. And no, we did not get the original $30 back. It was an expensive visa, both in worry and cost.