How Visavu works
We are an information aggregator. We pull visa rules from official government sources, normalize them into a single comparable shape, and surface every answer with a primary source link, a confidence indicator, and the date we last verified the data.
Where the data comes from
We layer three categories of sources, weighted by authority on each field:
- Direct government scrapes — ministry of foreign affairs and immigration service pages. These are the authoritative sources for visa fees, processing times, and application URLs.
- Embassy sites in the origin country — embassies often publish operational detail (appointment booking, document checklists) that the home ministry omits.
- Wikipedia and Wikidata — used as a coverage layer for cells we don't yet directly source. Lower confidence weight; never load-bearing for fees or processing time.
How we measure confidence
Every answer carries a correctness rating (cross-source agreement, weighted by authority on the specific field) and a freshness rating (how recently we verified the answer against a primary source — not how recently we crawled). We display the worse of the two as a bucket: High, Medium,Low, or Unverified.
We never display confidence as a percentage. “94% confident” implies precision the data does not have.
What we deliberately don't do
- We don't process visa applications. Apply directly with the government, or pay your local embassy fee. We will never charge a service fee or rush fee, because that creates an incentive to be flashy rather than right.
- We don't replace embassy verification. A valid visa permits entry subject to officer discretion at the border. For dual nationals, complex travel history, or unusual cases, the embassy is the authoritative source.
- We don't fake freshness. If we last verified an answer six months ago, it reads as “Unverified” — even if the underlying record hasn't changed. The user should know we haven't recently checked.
Found something wrong?
Every result card has a “Report incorrect info” link. We triage user reports within a documented window and update or correct the underlying record.