Iran to start issuing tourist visas soon

Iran will start issuing visas to foreign tourists from next month. After suspending the said services for almost 19 months due to the COVID crisis, the country has now announced that it will start issuing the said visas soon.

Referring to this, Tourism Minister Ezzatollah Zarghami stated that the issuance of tourist visas from land and air borders will resume from October 23.

As per the reports, Iran banned the entry of foreign nationals since March last year, a few weeks after the country detected its first cases of COVID-19 infection. The decision to restart visa services was taken recently, during a meeting of Iran’s anti-Coronavirus taskforce, which was attended by Iran President Ebrahim Raisi too.

The committee, however, added, “This regulation will not include direct and indirect travel from or to high-risk countries declared by the World Health Organisation.”

Iran has been battling the deadliest outbreak of COVI-19 in the Middle East and has recorded more than 55 lakh cases of infection as per the latest official figures. The authorities, however, admit that the numbers are largely underestimated.

Latest reports have it that the country’s caseload has now begun to decline, after registering a peak in August, which as per the officials was a ‘fifth wave’ driven by the Delta variant of COVID.

In February, the Tourism Ministry informed that travel went down 94 percent, whereas Iran welcomed more than 8.8 million tourists in the year before the outbreak of Coronavirus.