Visa Waiver Programme to cost US$14 a visit

Until now, neither the Maltese Government nor the US embassy in Malta have announced the new fees, which are now being investigated by the EU.

The visa waiver programme allowed travellers to visit the US without a visa for a period of up to 90 days for tourism or business.

Currently, 36 countries – 23 of them EU Member States, including Malta – are included in the programme. US citizens have equivalent visa-free access to the whole of the EU.

In March, the US Congress had voted to levy a fee on users of the visa waiver scheme to fund a new US agency to promote tourism.

Congress had originally set the fee at $10 (€7.51), but the final amount had risen to $14 to cover administrative costs.

The Department of Home Security (DHS) was tasked by Congress with working out the details of how the fee would operate.

Travellers would have to pay the fee when they filled out a compulsory online form to travel to the US.

The completion of the form, known as the Electronic System for Travel Authorisation (ESTA), has been mandatory since January 2009 for people who wanted to use the visa waiver programme.

Until now, however, travellers had not been obliged to pay any fees linked to the ESTA form.

According to the US Customs and Border Protection website, the fee, which will be required under the by the Travel Promotion Act of 2009 will be divided into two – a processing charge of $4 that will be charged to all applicants requesting an electronic travel authorisation.

If your application is approved and you receive authorisation to travel to the US under the VRP, an additional $10.00 would be charged to your credit card.

If your electronic travel authorization is denied, you are only charged for the processing of your application.

On the same day that the DHS announced the introduction of the new fee, the European Commission warned that it “very much” regretted the US decision to introduce the $14 charge.

The Commission explained how it planned to analyse the fee “to determine whether the new measure is equivalent to the US imposing a visa requirement on EU citizens”.

“I have repeatedly raised concerns about the introduction of this fee,” the European commissioner for home affairs Cecilia Malmström said.

“I remain convinced that these new requirements, applicable only to travellers under the visa waiver programme, are inconsistent with the commitment of the US to facilitate transatlantic mobility,” she warned.

The Commission has announced that that it would carry out a “further assessment” of the ESTA system, in light of the introduction of the fee.

In the past, the Commission had threatened to impose visa requirements on US diplomats unless the US granted EU citizens the same visa-fee access to its territory that its nationals enjoyed when they visited the EU.

Back in 2008, when the ESTA was originally introduced, the Commission had expressed its concern that the US requirement that people fill out ESTA forms prior to travel could be tantamount to a visa requirement.

It had carried out an investigation but had concluded, in December 2008, that this had not been the case.

The Commission’s longstanding position had been that countries whose nationals could travel to the EU without a visa must grant EU citizens equivalent visa-free access.