Originally Posted by
Schwann
Moreover how can anyone take Qatar seriously as a tourist destination when they add these rules with no notice?
To be fair this was announced and put into law in 2021, the law came into force in 2022, implemented in 2023. I do agree though that they should have a lot more info published and whatever has been published is confusing and doesn't answer many questions. This will cause disruption at boarding and on stopovers and will put people off going out during transits. It is also very counterproductive for the tourism and hospitality industry in Qatar.
Originally Posted by
lazarus89
Take a bunch of money from people who won't use their services, and use it to top up local healthcare funding.
Clever, but very poorly implemented. If they were smart they would build it into the ticket price for any flight that terminates in Doha or provides for a long enough stopover for someone to leave the airport.
This isn't really a money grab, that is not the aim of it, I do agree it is very poorly implemented. The aim is to reduce the amount of people that come on tourist or visit visas to take advantage of the free or heavily subsidized government healthcare, which has been a problem in Qatar and overloads the health system for Qataris and the residents that don't have health coverage to use private healthcare. Typically this issue is more with family visit visas and not from visa on arrival eligible countries.
It would be difficult to incorporate into the fee of tickets that terminate in Qatar because the booking systems wont differentiate between citizens, residents, uninsured visitors and insured visitors. I wish they would implement it in a better way, maybe incorporate some of the ideas below:
1. Have the fee be taken at immigration, unless the visitor chooses to prepay online or they already have valid travel insurance.
2. If it the visitor prepays online, it should only be a verifiable token to prove payment to speed up the process and not require all the detail they currently do and that token can be tied with the immigration record once the person enters Qatar.
3. To simplify the process and since the minimum coverage and price is standardised, rather than picking a company the fee should be collected and the passenger is either assigned one of the insurance providers randomly or the insurance providers all pool in to cover all the visitors. That will mean a single portal to obtain coverage and a single point of contact to file claims.
4. They should accept any international travel insurance with valid coverage, right now the list is restricted to certain providers such as AXA.