Getting Prepared for Customs
Now that you have scored a cheap flight after looking at our previous post, you are ready for landing. As soon as you land in any new country, you will have to go through a customs line. In this article we will ensure you have the correct travel Visa for your trip to New Zealand. See you in the customs line!
Know What Documentation You Need:
It’s of the utmost importance to know what documents and visas you need to have prepared to enter New Zealand without any issues. This may be the least exciting part of preparing for your trip. But if you don’t have your correct documents prepared and ready, then you may not be having a trip at all. If you’ve been putting this part of the planning off, you need to go ahead and get started. Once it’s done, you’ll feel much more prepared, and you’ll get to focus more on the fun stuff!
A Note To Our Readers:
As you might have read on our home page, we are from the US. Handling visas is the most country specific topic that we’ve written about on our site. If you aren’t American, some info here on Visas may not be applicable to you. Regardless, I’d encourage you to research on your own what your country’s visa requirements and allowances are in relation to New Zealand. However, I’ll have a few other document tips in here as well, so this article is still worth a read.
New Zealand Government Immigration Site:
If you haven’t discovered this already, New Zealand’s government immigration site has excellent resources on how to get travel visas. They will also be the most up to date on requirements. Please refer to that website as the final authority on visas.
New Zealand Travel Visa (90 Days or Less)
First off, there are 59 countries that do not have visa requirements for visiting New Zealand for a 90 day stay or less (180 days if you’re British). This list includes some of the most populous countries in the world. If you’re reading this there’s a good chance you are a citizen of one of them. Like I mentioned earlier, if you plan your trip in New Zealand to be 90 days or less, then good news – you don’t have to worry about getting a visa! You will, however, need to get a New Zealand Electronic Travel Authority, otherwise known as a NZeTA.
NZeTA’s are fast to get and very cheap. They take only three days to process and cost $23 NZD online or $17 NZD if you get it through NZ’s immigration app. You’ll get a digital form of your NZeTA and you can use that to get through immigration at the airport. If during your stay you decide you want to stay longer than 90 days, then you’ll need to apply for a visa. Go here to start an application.
New Zealand Visa – Working Holiday (1 Year)
You may want to have a longer stay than the NZeTA allows or you want to work while you’re in New Zealand. If so, then I recommend applying for a Working Holiday Visa. This is what Kenna and I had. Working Holiday Visas are limited to 45 countries that have a specific agreement with New Zealand to allow their citizens to work there. Working Holiday Visas allow you to stay in New Zealand for up to 1 year and to work during your stay, or study in a 6 month program.
Eligibility Requirements and Cost
Like any visa, there are eligibility requirements. For most countries, only people between the ages of 18 and 30 are eligible to receive a Working Holiday Visa. Each individual traveler must have a Working Holiday Visa to travel to New Zealand. You can’t bring a spouse or kids on your visa. It also visa prohibits you from accepting a permanent job in New Zealand.
The current cost is $420 NZD. It may take over 20 days to receive your visa, though we got ours within 2. Once your application is accepted, you must travel to New Zealand within one year of your visa acceptance. However, the day that you arrive in New Zealand marks the first day of your visa usage. For example, we got our visa in May 2022 and landed in New Zealand in September 2022. Our visa allowed us to stay in New Zealand until September of 2023 because your arrival date is your visa activation date. You can only receive this visa once in your life – once you use it, it’s gone.
Other New Zealand Visa Types:
There are still a decent number of visa types one can apply for to travel to New Zealand. However, most of those are related to full-time work and living in the country. Those visas are not something that I can cover here. If you are looking to travel for fun or for short-term work, the NZeTA or the Working Holiday visa are the most accessible and popular ways to go.
Tips for Document Keeping:
You will need to present your visa when checking in at the airport and at customs upon arrival. A printed version is the easiest to hand over to custom officers as they check you into the country. Definitely make sure you have that. In addition, as a backup I highly recommend keeping a digital copy downloaded or screenshotted on your phone so you can access the information without needing to be online. Even in addition to that, keep copies of your visa on a cloud backed systems like Google Drive, so that you can access it on a device that is not your phone if need be.
Between these three versions of your visas, you should be able to safely keep your information on-hand if you lose access to one or both of the others. Personally, I also kept digital copies of Kenna and I’s passports, driver’s licenses, and Covid-19 vaccination cards on my Google Drive. This was a lifesaver for us when traveling from Australia to Indonesia, as we had lost our physical Covid vaccination cards somewhere along the way. Having a digital back up got us through with little issue.
Wrapping it up
I hope this was a helpful overview for you. Get the essentials sorted and you can move on to planning the fun stuff!
