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Every single question that asks "do I need a visa" is answered on the IATA Travel Centre. There's no point in trying to guess what rules apply to a certain person when the IATA has it all. So... should we?

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    Not all of their rules are very easy for a novice to understand, so I see value in providing easier to read and easier to understand answers, citing the IATA rules if needed
    – Gagravarr
    Sep 12, 2015 at 9:40
  • Rulles...? It's just a questionnaire with what looks like very easy to understand questions.
    – user4188
    Sep 12, 2015 at 17:24
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    @chx Have you actually used it for yourself outside of simple situations like “Do Canadians need a visa to visit the UK?”
    – Relaxed
    Sep 14, 2015 at 18:23
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    And I'm a bit leery of advertising that IATA site because, frankly, it occasionally gives wrong answers. Which is interesting in itself since it appears to be just a front end to timaticweb2 (which gives the right answers when queried from other sites).
    – Michael Hampton
    Oct 30, 2015 at 0:44
  • That's funny, IATA claims it's theirs: "TimaticWeb 2 is a new solution from IATA".
    – user4188
    Oct 30, 2015 at 0:55

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No, for several reasons:

  • The IATA website asks for a lot of irrelevant and sometimes hard to understand questions. I do not find it easy to use and I am very familiar with the regulations, e.g. in the Schengen area.

  • IATA does not have it all. We already have much more info in a series of question and askers still come up with corner cases and things that are not covered, or at least not covered explicitly.

    Consider this question, asked today: Can I travel to EU states with a Bulgarian Blue Card? How can you find out using the website you mentioned? Are you confident that an EU Blue Card is simply a “residence permit”? Do you fill that in as travel document or somewhere else? If I enter what I believe is the right info, I end up on a page that only mentions residence permits for EEA nationals' family members. Does the lack of any other exemption positively mean that there is none? You need a lot of faith both in the website and in your ability to use it to rely on the lack of any explicit info as an answer to the question!

  • IATA is not an authoritative source and could be wrong. Granted, I don't have any specific example and if they are wrong, you are still in trouble because you will probably face someone who will rely on the TIMATIC database to deny boarding but still. We already have great material here, with references to the controlling regulations and lots of practical tips, what would be the point of linking to an inferior source?
  • The IATA website only says “visa required”, not how to obtain one, under what conditions a given visa is valid, what can happen at the border (all this is a huge part of our visa questions).
  • Questions are only marked as duplicate when they have been asked here. We could still close visa questions as “trivial” but then we might as well close most questions because the info is out there somewhere.
  • Also, what about land borders?

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