Long Visa Wait Times to Be U.S.’s 'White Whale' in 2024
Photo Credit: The White House. Long visa wait times in Colombia, Mexico and India will remain very high in 2024. Unsplash / Kristina Volgenau
Skift Take
Doesn't seem unreasonably high visa wait times are going away any time soon in Mexico, India and Colombia.
Wait times for first-time visitor visas in Colombia, Mexico and India stretching to hundreds of days will continue to be a headache for the U.S. travel industry.
The reason? Demand for visas reached record highs in those countries, according to a media roundtable hosted by the State Department on Monday. The agency shared milestones, innovations and plans for the 2024 fiscal year.
Previously, the visa backlog had been driven by pent-up demand and staffing shortages at multiple U.S. embassies. Both were the result of the pandemic.
“When you see a 600-day wait time in a place like Bogota, when our counselor session there has done in some cases twice as many visas as they've ever done in some months, it's really, a new signal of demand for travel that goes beyond sort of a hangover for Cov
