#websummitrio — Public Fediverse posts

My least-replicable travel hack is now saving me money, not just time

The passport that I’ve taken for much of my international travel since the spring of 2017 finally has some stamps in it–courtesy of the Brazilian border officers in São Paolo who did the honors with my Irish passport at the start and end of my trip for Web Summit Rio this week.

While I had traveled to Rio on my U.S. passport the previous two years, Brazil has since rolled out its e-visa program for U.S., Canadian and Australian citizens. Applying for one of these 10-year travel permissions costs $80.90 and, per numerous reports from travelers, requires time and patience to deal with glitches and delays in the approval process.

Traveling with my Irish passport, however, required nothing beyond scanning it into the United app’s Travel-Ready Center, having a check-in agent at Dulles eyeball that before issuing my boarding pass for last Saturday’s flight, and showing it one more time to a gate agent during boarding.

I didn’t have any issues exiting the country on that passport either, although having two passports on the reservation meant I had go through a second doc check for my U.S. passport before getting a boarding pass for my flight back to the States.

This was the second time this year that my Irish citizenship has saved me little money instead of merely letting me use shorter passport lines in Europe as an EU national (and not getting a passport stamp in the process).

Since Jan. 8, American citizens traveling to the United Kingdom have had to pay £16 for a two-year ETA (electronic travel authorisation) and do that at least three business days before flying to the U.K. It could have been worse; the British government originally planned to require an ETA just for connecting through Heathrow before relenting.

But Irish nationals are exempt from this, in keeping with the U.K. and Ireland’s Common Travel Area arrangements. So I didn’t have to worry about getting an ETA for my two-day stopover in London between Web Summit Qatar and MWC Barcelona.

Starting in the last quarter of 2026, I’ll get one more way to save a little money when the EU implements its ETIAS (European Travel Information and Authorisation System), which will cost €7 and be valid for three years or, if sooner, the expiration of the passport used to apply for it. EU nationals will, of course, be exempt from that.

I feel a little guilty ducking all of these minor administrative obstacles since all of these countries are only responding to longstanding U.S. travel-permissions requirements for their own citizens. Brazilian citizens need a visa to travel to the U.S., with fees starting at $185 for a 10-year non-immigrant tourist visa. And U.K. and EU nationals need to pay $21 for an ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization), good for two years or passport expiration.

No American can blame any foreign government for deciding to return a little of these favors. And every American should hope that foreign governments following news of the incarcerations of international tourists and students in the U.S. (in some cases only for their speech) under the xenophobic Trump administration have the grace not to reciprocate.

#BrazilEVisa #dualCitizenship #ESTA #EUETIAS #internationalTravel #IrishCitizenship #IrishPassport #passportStamps #passports #UKETA #USPassport #USVisa #WebSummitRio

RIO DE JANEIRO

I landed here Monday and I took off Friday, and it’s fair to ask how much I ever arrived in this city during my trip for Web Summit Rio. As in, the amount of time I spent in any public space outdoors could probably be measured in minutes.

Unlike my journey to Rio last year, when I had an entire day free before Web Summit events and the morning through early afternoon open the day after the conference wrapped up, I might as well have parachuted in this year.

And then the difficulty of getting around this city limited any remaining sightseeing to the view through car or van windows or from one event venue or another.

I blame most of that on Rio traffic on the streets and highways that seem the only feasible way to get from the beach-adjacent conference hotel to anywhere else. Which here meant taking absurdly cheap Uber rides every time outside morning and evening shuttle-van commutes between the hotel and the Riocentro convention center.

Some of those vans got an extra boost in form of an escort by police officers on motorcycles who held up traffic at merge lanes–a further isolation of conference speakers from the rest of the city that didn’t seem to save much time in practice.

Rio does have a modest metro subway and light rail system, but they didn’t go near any of this year’s conference locations. As for the enormous bus network that includes miles of BRT-only lanes: Sorry, no. Google Maps never suggested a bus routing remotely time-competitive with hailing an Uber, as if I ever could have enlisted fellow conference attendees in a transit adventure the way I have for Web Summit’s Lisbon and Toronto conferences.

(Rio’s reputation for crime, fair or not, was not absent from these transportation considerations. Also worth stating: Not a single word of this post about conference-subsidized travel should be read as entitling me to any sympathy for this first-world problem.)

But I still appreciated getting to see more of Rio this time even if it had to involve a windshield perspective.

And never more so than Tuesday night, when an invitation to a party being hosted by friends of friends–perhaps friends of friends of friends–led to an Uber ride up increasingly narrow and winding streets up a steep grade through neighborhoods we did not remotely recognize before we realized we’d gotten the wrong address, corrected the error, and made our way to an Airbnb nestled atop the folds of a rocky hilltop that could have figured in a Brazilian version of Entourage.

The view from that rock-star retreat of glittering high-rises in Barra de Tijuca, the harbor beyond and the hills above was utterly magnificent–including a look at the Southern Cross without buildings in the way–and it reminded me to try to see a little more of the city the next time.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/04/19/seeing-a-city-from-inside-a-conference-bubble/

#Brasil #Brazil #conference #firstWorldProblem #RioDeJaneiro #Riocentro #traffic #Uber #WebSummit #WebSummitRio