Travel | Tips on How To Get Through Customs and Immigration Process Faster
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Every travellers have different kind of tips and tricks on how they can get through customs and immigration process faster. Who doesn’t want to get through them faster, if possible we always wanted to speed up the process. I don’t know about you guys, each and every time when I arrived at the foreign airport, my heart always beating faster especially when queuing up in line to get to the passport controller and to get our passport stamped.
I don’t want to list all of the tips and tricks because I don’t have any, I just wanted to share a little bit of my experience and I know that most of you here are a frequent visitor and I do believe most of you here and frequent traveler also, bit before that let’s make things clear about Customs and immigration officer.
Immigration :
Immigration process is responsible for ensuring people enter any country legally. This is basically passport control and this is where you will encounter immigration. They check travel documents looking for anything suspicious along with asking a few questions. There is a clear distinction between the two. Most people will encounter immigration officer first where your passport is checked followed by customs you have the opportunity to declare good.
Customs :
Customs role is to control items from entering a country. They are usually involved in searching for drugs, counterfeits, and different types of smuggling. They also play a role in collecting taxes on taxable items when entering a country. You usually see these officials after passport control where you must decide if you have anything to declare or not. Most of the time you hand them a piece of paper and move right on by.
So I want to share with you about getting through Immigration process faster, or if not faster, just to get through. Nowadays with all this IS (Islamic State) and ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), passport control officer will always curious when dealing with travellers especially from Islamic country and especially if you are a muslim and your name or your look, resemblance of the most wanted terrorist. Yes, I know, it is quite unfair but that’s how things work now.
When I was arriving at Heathrow Airport in London, I was asked by the Immigration Officer or the passport controller a lot of question, he gives me a strange look, his eye looks like almost wanted pop out of the socket, or maybe he simply wanted to interrogate me, first things he asked me “What are you doing in London?”. Then when I told him that it was just a quick stay, and I wanted to go to Russia afterwards, he asked me again, why must stop by at London and not flying straight to Moscow, he has a valid reason and he has the right to be curious because why I’m flying far away to London and then getting down to Moscow, if you look at the map you will understand,
it’s like why I choose to travel to London first if my destination is Istanbul. I told the passport controller that I was getting a cheaper air ticket to London compare to fly directly to Moscow, and then he asked me more question, this and that. I also told him that I wanted to do the Trans-Siberian Railway trip, and he asked me about the itinerary, so I give him a file containing all my itinerary, train tickets, hostel/hotel booking and subway metro map of each city that I plan to visit. He look at the file, almost every pages and then he hand over the file back to me and then my passport get stamped.
Sometimes you can get easily past the immigration officer faster without any question asked, depending n which country you visit. And I know that it is quite tricky to get to London and Russia so, I’ve prepared everything about my trip in the file. My file contain my completed itinerary, hostel booking letters, flight tickets, train tickets, subway or map of each city that I plan to visit, few destination that I want to visit complete with details on how to get there, what buses or metro to take and few more. Another things is you must stay clam at all time, and answer the question confidently. Know what you are doing, try to control yourself.
Same things happen when I was arriving at Saint Petersburg passport control, the man at the desk asked me all kind of question and when I said I want to do the Trans-Siberian railway all the way to Beijing China, he wanted to look at my train tickets, so I hand over to him my file with all the details and then I get through it without further question.
My point here is that, make sure you have all your documents ready and I think among the best that we can do is keeping all of our documents in a single file, yes we must also have a backup copy somewhere, in the cloud storage or in our email, just in case something is missing and another thing is, always have your Embassy Address (Your Country Embassy in the country you plan to visit) and have their Tel No ready at you hand. If anything still unclear, unsettled, then your embassy might or could help you, in fact they are responsible to help you.
After that you will pass through or stopped by at the custom counter check point but if you have nothing to declare, just move on. Most traveler have no problem with this because we normally have nothing much with us, just a backpack with our clothing and maybe the only thing that is valuable is our smartphone, camera and maybe a laptop. If you are stopped by, don’t argue and just follow the order.
There are amy other ways on getting through the immigration officer which you can find online but here, I just wanted to share with you about the documentation, filing up your documentation, yes each country is different but better be prepared than sorry.
