Visa and entry preparation

Voyalier does not decide whether you need a visa, and it never will. What it can help with is the other half of the problem: not the rules, which governments publish and change, but the execution, which nobody publishes and almost everybody gets wrong the first time.

What the guide is, and what it refuses to be

The split is absolute, and a test fails the build if it is ever broken:

• Every factual claim about a requirement is a link to the authority that published it.
• Every sentence Voyalier writes is a translation or a caution — what the authority calls something, what that means in plain language, or a specific way people commonly trip.

Voyalier never states a fee, a processing time, or an eligibility outcome, and it never reports that your entry requirements are satisfied. The one place numbers appear at all — the published processing times card below — shows only figures your own device read from the authority’s page, quoted verbatim with the source, the retrieval time, and the licence attached.

Setting your passport

Open a trip and choose Visa in the section nav. Start typing either the country’s name or its two-letter code — the picker suggests countries by name in your own language, and a bare code (IN, NG, GB) always works exactly as before. A new trip offers the passport from your last one as a single tap, clearly labelled — offered, never applied, because a trip may not be for the same traveller.

Your nationality is encrypted at rest alongside your confirmations, and so is every note you write against a document.

Reading the quoted route

Once a passport is set, Voyalier shows the entry path as a quote, carrying the authority that published it and the date the list was read:

Visitor visa (temporary resident visa) Quoted from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada · read on 2026-07-28

Where a curated authority publishes conditions rather than a single answer, you get that authority’s official link and no curated journey. Voyalier will not fill that gap with a guess — the United Kingdom is the clearest case, covered below. Where the destination is not curated at all, there is no authority to quote, so Voyalier names none: it will not stand a different country’s government in front of you because that is the one it happens to know.

Neither case is a dead end any more. Wherever no curated journey exists, the universal playbook takes its place.

The universal playbook

Routes without a curated journey get a six-step route map — how to find the authority and dodge the lookalike agency sites that outrank it, the shared vocabulary entry paths are written in, the document classes that go wrong when started late, where to file, how to track, and what a decision does and does not promise at the border.

The playbook opens with a banner that tells you exactly what it is: written by Voyalier, not read from any authority, and not specific to your route. Every step tells you what to confirm at the official source, and where the route has a named authority, the playbook links that authority’s page and nothing else. Its document items are cautions, deliberately conditional — “photographs, if they are asked for” — because the official checklist is the only list, and the playbook’s job is to make sure the slow items on it do not catch you late.

Ticks and notes work the same in both guides, and both count into the same self-reported tally.

Working the steps

The cockpit lists the steps down the left and opens one at a time on the right. Each step names what the authority calls the thing, then explains it plainly, then lists the documents it takes — each with the specific mistakes that cost people applications, and a link to the official page.

Tick a document when you have it. Add a private note if you want to remember where you got to. Both persist per trip, so you can close Voyalier mid-application and come back to where you were.

Step one of a curated journey is a question Voyalier refuses to answer, and it is the most valuable thing here. Some authorities publish a far cheaper alternative to a full visa for citizens of some visa-required countries — Canada’s electronic travel authorization for travellers who have held a Canadian visa in the past ten years or hold a valid US non-immigrant visa is the motivating case. The eligible list is short and it moves. Voyalier puts the question in front of you with the list attached, because a traveller who qualifies but never checks pays for a visa they did not need.

Published processing times

For destinations whose authority is named, the cockpit carries a statistics card headed by that authority’s name. It starts empty on purpose: no figure is bundled with the app, ever — a shipped number ages into a lie, and a stale processing time is the kind that costs a booking.

Where the authority publishes its times in a form Voyalier can read — IRCC’s processing-times dataset for Canada, UKVI’s decision waiting times page for the United Kingdom — one press fetches them. The consent sentence beside the button says exactly what happens: your device contacts that authority once to read its published page, and nothing about you or your trip is sent, because the page is the same for every traveller. What comes back is quoted verbatim — the source’s own labels, its own units, its own “no processing time available” where that is what it says — with the retrieval time, the source’s own as-of date where it publishes one, and the licence line. Where the source publishes per-country rows, the row for your own passport code is marked, and the caption tells you to confirm it is yours.

The copy is kept on your device. When a later fetch fails, the kept copy stays visible with a loud banner saying when it was saved; when any copy is more than a week old, it says so and tells you to fetch again before relying on it. Authorities that publish no readable dataset — Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, the United States today — get an honest sentence and the official link instead of a broken fetch button.

What this does not change

The Entry requirements item in readiness is deliberately untouched. It still reads “Check yourself”, it still asserts nothing, and it still cannot clear your trip. It gains one line reporting your own tally — attributed to you in the same sentence, because Voyalier has verified none of it. With the playbook, that tally now exists on every route, not only curated ones.

Coverage

Three destinations carry a curated journey: Canada — both the visitor visa and the electronic travel authorization routes — Japan’s short-term-stay visa, and Australia’s electronic authorization. Each carries its own “read on” date, because re-reading one authority says nothing about the others.

The journeys do not share a shape, and that is the point. Japan publishes no electronic authorization at all; its online visa service is a channel for the same visa, and eligibility depends on the country you live in rather than the passport you hold, so it appears as a link inside the journey rather than as a door of its own. Japan also conditions many of its visa exemptions on a passport type or a prior registration — Voyalier cannot see which passport you hold, so those resolve to the ministry’s own table, and the playbook fills the step-by-step gap without pretending to be Japan’s answer.

The United Kingdom is named as an authority and deliberately resolves no curated route, and that is the design working rather than a hole in it. GOV.UK publishes no per-nationality table Voyalier could quote from; it publishes an interactive questionnaire, because the answer turns on the purpose and the length of your visit as much as on the passport you hold. Any per-passport answer Voyalier printed would be a guess wearing a quote’s clothes. So a UK trip gets the authority named, a link to GOV.UK’s own Check if you need a UK visa checker, the universal playbook labelled as Voyalier’s own writing — and, one press away, UKVI’s own published waiting times.

Every other destination gets the playbook and honesty about the rest: no authority named, no link invented, no borrowed government.

The guidance itself is compiled into the app and stamped with the date it was read, rather than fetched — neither journey authority publishes a machine-readable feed for its rules, so a curated-and-dated guide is the only honest shape, and it works offline. The statistics are the deliberate exception: read live from the authority’s own publication at your request, never shipped in the box (ADR-0014).

Always confirm your own case at the official source before you pay, book, or travel.