There are a great many pages on the internet listing visa rules for Gulf travellers, and a fair number of them are out of date. We are not going to add another, because the honest position is that entry requirements depend on your nationality, your residency, your route and sometimes the month — and because a page that is wrong about this costs a reader a flight.
The questions that are stable
What is stable enough to be worth writing down is the list of questions. If you can answer these before you book, very little goes wrong at the airport.
How long is your passport valid for? Many destinations require validity well beyond your return date, and the requirement is checked at departure by the airline, not on arrival by the country. This is the single most common reason someone is refused boarding on a ticket they paid for, and it is entirely avoidable by looking at the date now.
How many blank pages are left? A handful of destinations still require them. It takes ten seconds to check and it is not something the airline will warn you about in advance.
Is your route one ticket or two? If you are connecting, whether the whole journey was sold as a single itinerary changes what happens if the first leg is late, and it can change whether you need to clear immigration and re-check bags in the middle. It also changes whether you need a transit visa for the connecting country — which is a different question from whether you need a visa for your destination, and one people routinely skip.
Does anyone in the party have a different nationality from the rest? Family bookings frequently do, and the requirements will not match. Check each passport separately rather than assuming the group travels on the same terms.
Are your names on the ticket exactly as they appear in the passport? Not the name you use — the name printed in the document, in that order. Corrections after ticketing carry a fee on most airlines and are not possible on some.
Where the binding answer comes from
Where do you get the binding answer? For the destination, the official source for your nationality: the country's own immigration authority, or its embassy. For your UAE status, we can help directly — visa changes and renewals are a service this agency runs in-house. For anything on a ticket we issued, call us and we will check it against the airline's own record rather than a screenshot.
Our desk answers in English, Arabic, Tagalog, Farsi, Hindi, Urdu and Malayalam, daily between 8:30 AM and 8:30 PM. If you are not sure whether a question is worth asking, it is — the ones that cost money are almost always the ones someone assumed.