Hi all,
My wife holds a permanent NZ residence visa and has just received her new passport from her closest embassy so she needs to get that visa transferred into her new passport.
She was thinking to get a visa label as when she first got residence it was an E-Visa meaning she had to carry a piece of paper around with her passport while traveling as this was the evidence of her residence visa for getting on to planes etc, something far from ideal when compared to a visa label stuck securely into a passport.
The thing is when reading on the immigration NZ website it states that E-Visas are just as good as they can be used by airlines to check residence status before boarding a flight etc, but I have not found this to be the case, we traveled to Singapore where the check in is self service and done by machine and the machine asked her to scan the visa in her passport to allow her to board the plane, we had to go and seek help as this is something we could not do with her printed out E-Visa.
My question is, is getting the Visa label the better way to go? we sure think so based on our experience and not having to carry a piece of paper around which is very important (and has a high chance of being lost with other printed things like hotel bookings etc) or should we just get the E-Visa (and if so then why).
If we get the visa label, is the residence also loaded electronically on the passport?