In Europe, the tourism business is one of the most profitable sectors of the economy, which, moreover, creates additional jobs. However, for tourists from Russia, the ability to travel around the Old World is significantly hampered by visas.
It will not be possible to completely abolish the visa regime between the Schengen countries and Russia, since Europe is already suffering from an influx of illegal immigrants. However, it should be noted that most of them arrived in the European Union on tourist visas. The European Commission has put forward the idea of electronic visas, which will help solve the problem of illegal emigration and not lose income from Russian tourism.
The essence of the idea is that potential tourists from Russia do not have to personally come to the embassies and consulates of European states with a package of documents to obtain a visa. It will be enough not later than 72 hours before the trip to fill out a questionnaire on the embassy's website. Instead of general civil and foreign passports, it will be possible to submit photocopies of the corresponding pages. The entire package of documents is sent to the embassy by regular mail. Information about issued visas will be stored in a special database Visa Entitlement Verification Online (VEVO). It will be possible to pay for visas by bank cards. This system is already in place when Russian citizens receive Australian visas.
When entering an EU state, Russians will be fingerprinted. Upon departure, the system will record that the tourist has left the country. In this way, it will be easier to track people who have decided to illegally stay in Europe. True, the Europeans did not take into account the peculiarities of the work of the Russian Post. Perhaps it will be easier for potential tourists to get to the nearest consulate and personally hand over the documents than to be nervous, wondering whether the package was delivered to its destination or not.
In September 2012, the European Commissioner for Security and Home Affairs is to submit a developed document on the issue of electronic visas. True, even if the document is adopted, the system will not work until 2017.
