Supposedly service is better as well. I wonder if they’re still allowed to be on their phones?
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2:48AM - Entertaining Kuwait since 20032:48AM - Entertaining Kuwait since 2003
Supposedly service is better as well. I wonder if they’re still allowed to be on their phones?
26 replies on “New Immigration Counters at the Airport”
They were on their phones last night. Counters look great but only have half completed so the lines are still slower.
Is that the only upgrade?
The thing that needs the most upgrading is not the counter itself, but what’s behind it.
Ha ha, you are 100% right.
+1
They have no motivation to change. It’s not like they will turn off potential investors or tourists.
LOL! Spot on
The airport needs a fresh start, from every aspect, security, functionality, staff, Design.. you name name it we need it.
Upgrading parts of the airport won’t do shit the building is obsolete, and so is the lazy ass staff. The real investment is to develop a system that requires less human interaction and more industrial management.
Agreed. I love the self-service immigration kiosks at JFK.
they still sit on their damn phones, are still grumpy as hell, and now want us to open our passports on the residency page for them too. That and the fact that the entire area is still way too small and the lines arent seperated properly. They are doing everything possible to avoid building a new airport and nothing is working. I used Qatar Airways last week on a trip to the Maldives and was overwhelmed by the new airport in Doha. Its beautiful, functional and profitable as is Qatar Airways. If Kuwait really wants to become less dependent on oil, that would have been a great new source of revenue. However, i think that it might be too late now since you now have Etihad, Qatar Airways and of course Emirates all competing for the same passengers
Kuwait is hundreds of years away from competing with Qatar and the UAE in just about anything. They simply lack the will to do it.
You know you’re in lazy Kuwait when the LED counter openly says “Please open your residency page”.
Actually a lot of airports require you to open a certain page.
I’ve never ever been asked to open my passport on a specific page anywhere else
+ it makes the job faster for the officer specially when there is huge crowd.
Ha! That’s hilarious!
Yesterday, I went to pick up my sibling and his family who arrived from Canada via Jeddah on flight SV500. Flight arrived 15 minutes early at 14:15 and they immediately disembarked.
Since they have Canadian citizenship, they get Visa on arrival. They filled the required details and waited, waited and waited some more and a lot more.
Finally I was able to greet them at 16:45
So much for the “NEW IMMIGRATION COUNTERS AT THE AIRPORT”.
Oh and btw, my brother said that Jeddah Airport was worse, officers were not human; they were BARKING… 🙂
@adly: Even the immigration officers at the UAE airport remind passengers to keep the residency page open for quick reference!
@Kuwait: Makes sense rather than them flipping thru the pages of the passport and checking for the valid residency stamp. Saves on a bit of time somewhere at least! 🙂
I go to Dubai at least twice a month and i’ve never been asked to do that.Moreover, when I go there alone without my kids, i can also use the e-gates which is even faster
More time to play on their phones that is
I don’t mind opening the visa page of my passport for them but i hope they don’t mind if i tell them where to put their stamps… not anywhere wasting/ jumping other pages of my passport.
RIGHT ?! And they get so insulted when you tell them not to stamp on another (empty) page. They give you the look of death, like you just committed a crime.. FTS, I do not pay 50 KD every other year for a new stinkin passport for this shit
But they INSIST on 2 clean adjacent pages for a new visa.
My colleagues and I arrived in from a flight at the Kuwait airport two weeks ago on a Friday evening. There were 1-2 immigration officials serving 6 or 7 lines of “OTHER NATIONALITIES”. I wished I would have took a panoramic photograph of the wall to wall lines of poor people waiting while the one lucky went up from each line. It took easily an hour. Our driver/ride was furious, as they had waited 2 hours.
I had the misfortune of flying to Sri Lanka (on tour) on April 1 (I think that’s when the mess started)…. what a start!!! The queue to the immigration went all the way to the road where passengers are dropped off! Our plea to the security personnel to let us in as our boarding time was on fell on deaf ears and we were told to just wait in line.
Fortunately (as is the practice in Kuwait), we found a friend standing closer to the front and we shoved ourselves in there. An hour later and we had taken about a dozen steps forward. My wife then approached an officer who just asked her to get back in line. Ignoring the evil one, she went to an officer at the 1st/ business class gate who promptly let us in. Another 90 odd minutes later, we cleared the passport control (2.5 hours from when we first stood in line) and walked close to a kilometre to our gate … yeah, the very last one!
We were then taken on one of the now regular short trip by bus to board our flight. Waited in the flight for another 90 odd minutes before the rest of the passengers caught up. The flight took of at 1.45 am instead of its scheduled 10.20 pm.
Once in Sri Lanka, we did not have to open our passport to any specific page. We had our ETA (Electronic Travel Authorization) printed on a separate paper, but they did not even ask for it. They just took our machine readable Indian passport, placed it on a machine that’s it! They open a used page, place a small visa sticker and done.
Why does a supposedly super rich country not make use of the machine readable passports that are now compulsory across the globe? Will a simple scan not give all the information required and quicken the process instead of asking us to open up a specific page?