7 Questions for the State Department on the Visa Delays Mess

25.08.2023 - 14:07 / skift.com / Anthony Capuano / U.S.Travelassociation / Dawit Habtemariam / Julie Stufft

American embassies are working around the clock to bring down the amount of time international travelers have to wait to get a visitor visa interview in order to travel to the U.S., according to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Visa Services Julie Stufft. The global median wait time for a B-1 or B-2 visa, also known as a visitor visa, has been reduced from 17 weeks in June to five weeks now. 

Aspiring travelers from some U.S. inbound markets, however, still have to wait hundreds of days to get an interview for their first visitor visa. Indian travelers now have to wait 700 days for an interview at the Mumbai embassy, according to the U.S. State Department’s website, down from 999 days in January but still very high. It reinforces a 2023 Skift megatrend that large numbers of travelers from non-Western countries will be locked out of U.S. conferences and destinations because of border bottlenecks.

Lobbying group U.S. Travel Association estimates visa delays will cost the industry nearly $7 billion in traveler spending in 2023. In January, Marriott CEO Anthony Capuano publicly called on the Biden Administration to take more action in an on-stage interview with the Chamber of Commerce. Hilton CEO Chris Nasetta said he will lead a “ratcheting up of attention” on the issue when he becomes national chair of U.S. Travel.

In this conversation with Skift’s Dawit Habtemariam, Stufft explains the visa bottleneck, U.S. State Department’s efforts to reduce it, why India’s wait times are absurdly high and more. The comments have been edited for length and clarity.

Skift: For two years, international travel was suspended because of the pandemic. Can you explain what happened with U.S. embassies when it came to visa processing in general as borders opened in 2022 and then zoom in on B-1 and B-2 visas?

Julie Stufft: We had an unprecedented work stoppage in our posts overseas and some places we were prohibited from doing that work. So we sent people home or we weren’t able to keep people overseas for various reasons. Now we are recovering and we’re really addressing that pent-up demand of people who would’ve theoretically applied had the pandemic never happened. For two years people weren’t able to apply, and that’s what we’re seeing now. 

Now, if we had talked six months ago, I would’ve told you that this is a global problem, we’re working on it globally. But now it’s really just a problem in a few places and with, as you identified the B-1, B-2, first time traveler group. We’ve narrowed it down to one type of traveler in just a few countries. It’s no longer a global visa sort of crisis in terms of wait times. In June, I think we had a 17 week global median wait time. Now it’s five weeks for B-1s, B-2s. So we’re