ETIAS – SEIAV will be launched soon at the end of the year. Any of the travelers belonging to the 59 visa exempt countries will be required to apply for ETIAS -SEIAV before they jump on the plane with his/her final destination being one of the 30 countries requiring ETIAS. In fact, this is one of the required questions that will be asked: what is the country you are visiting, for how long will you stay and whether you have any relatives who are citizens of any of the countries requiring the new travel authorization ETIAS.

Other general information such as full name, home address and other personal info will be required, but no health or biometrics data will be required to apply for ETIAS. This means that vaccines or any other health reports will not be necessary, and no biometrics such as fingerprints, which makes the process of applying much easier and faster submission. Also there will be questions about visiting conflict zones in the past, or any criminal convictions since security is number one priority as far as granting ETIAS – SEIAV travel authorization.

After submission the time frame for receiving a response will be within minutes the majority of the cases, approximately 95% of all applications. The other 5% will be passed to the member State where the traveler has intentions to go to. The ETIAS panel will take the final decision, since all the information provided will be crossed-check with all European databases, and in the case of a hit, more information could be requested to the applicant in order to clear the approval. But this second process can take up to 30days, so we need to be conscious about it in order to better plan our trip to any of the countries of the Schengen space.

Therefore, the information required for ETIAS – SEIAV will be about the same as other travel authorizations already in place in some other countries such as ESTA in the US and eTA in Canada, although we are not sure yet whether a passport picture upload will be necessary. Another difference is that we have 30 countries to choose from and to travel to, whereas ESTA and eTA  are only 1 country each.

Of course, having so many countries involved in this great project makes it difficult to coordinate, but as announced by official sources ETIAS – SEIAV will be announced at the end of the year 2023 to be launched in 2024.