Eye Scan - Immigration - Fujairah United Arab Emirates - Is it Required

[Longwood50]

I recently completed an NCL trip that included three ports in the UAE.  Dubai, Aubu Dhabi and Furairah  At the last moment they cancelled Furairah and stayed an extra night in Abu Dhabi.  The excuse they gave was that Furairah was not requiring each passenger to go through immigration and complete an eye scan which would take all day and it would be outside in the hot sun.  Has anyone been to Furairah recently and had to undergo an eye scan to enter.  I find the excuse hard to swallow since the eye scan was not required in Dubai or Abu Dhabi.  Additionally what would they be scanning the eyes against?  I have never had an eye scan at any airport so I can't believe their is much if any of a data base out there to scan against.  Further, certainly NCL being to the port before would or should have been aware of any undue requirements and never put the port on the itinerary if it was not practicable. 

Edited December 18, 2019 by Longwood50

[Bizmark'sMom]

According to this article, they are looking for deported foreigners trying to re-enter the Emirates using different travel documents.

https://www.khaleejtimes.com/article/20050601/ARTICLE/306019956/1002

[ducklite]

When the global economy crashed in 2007, UAE took a major hit with ex-pats walking away from rentals, car leases, and so much more.  At one point there were over 2000 abandoned luxury cars at the airport in Dubai.  Non-payment of debts is illegal in UAE and those who walked away are permanently barred from re-entering the country, even if formal deportation proceedings weren't initiated.  There are tens of thousands of former residents that have been barred from re-entry.

[Heidi13]

In addition to the previous replies, the UAE may and do implement new requirements at their discretion, normally without prior notification. Therefore, NCL may not have experienced this on previous visits. All part of the risks of visiting the Middle East.

[ilikeanswers]

14 hours ago, Longwood50 said:

Additionally what would they be scanning the eyes against?  I have never had an eye scan at any airport so I can't believe their is much if any of a data base out there to scan against.   

 

How else will they build the data base if they don't collect the data😂? It would either be to do with local politics because the Emirate of Fujairah is a much more conservative Emirate compared to Dubai and Abu Dhabi so perhaps local leaders were getting nervous about the foreign influence and security threatre is always a political winner or it could be the UAE is testing the waters for the implementation of iris scanners. You have to remember the UAE is a surveillance state, everything you do is monitored and catalogued so it is not that strange they might want to start collecting iris data if they feel it will help them monitor the population especially the foreigners more closely and because they are not a democracy they don't have the wait for bureaucratic approval or wade through red tape so they can suddenly and without warning start new security measures. 

[Longwood50]

4 hours ago, ilikeanswers said:

 

How else will they build the data base if they don't collect the data😂

There are 7.7 billion people in the world but you assert that Fujairah alone is going to build a data base of eye scans?  Ludicrous.  Again the ships passengers were already in Dubai, and Abu Dhabi.  Assuming one came by plane not ship there were no eye scans at either city  and you could have driven to Fujairah and avoided any eye scan assuming that they really required one which I believe was a false pretense to cancel the port. 

[Shmoo here]

21 minutes ago, Longwood50 said:

There are 7.7 billion people in the world but you assert that Fujairah alone is going to build a data base of eye scans?  Ludicrous.  Again the ships passengers were already in Dubai, and Abu Dhabi.  Assuming one came by plane not ship there were no eye scans at either city  and you could have driven to Fujairah and avoided any eye scan assuming that they really required one which I believe was a false pretense to cancel the port. 

What proof do you have that it was a false pretense?  

 

As noted, any country can at at any time implement whatever security protocols they want.  As to whether they have any sort of database for an eye scan, who knows.  Maybe all people who were ever in that country prior to XX date were scanned at one time.  If they're keeping a eye out for someone who left the country and is trying to reenter, that's what they're comparing it to.

 

Or not.

 

 

[mom says]

41 minutes ago, Longwood50 said:

There are 7.7 billion people in the world but you assert that Fujairah alone is going to build a data base of eye scans?

Did you bother to read the article that was linked above? 

[Longwood50]

32 minutes ago, Shmoo here said:

What proof do you have that it was a false pretense?  

Common sense.

 

1.   If the passengers were able to enter Dubai airport with no eye screen they could easily travel by car to Fujairah and avoid any eye scan.

 

2. If eye scanning was required and as the captain stated would take all day, the cruise line would have known the requirement before selecting it as a port months before not 2 days before the ship was scheduled to arrive there

3. The assertion that the screening would take place outside in the hot sun is equally not plausible.  Even the UAE would not be setting up security equipment on the pier in the hot sun.  Certainly any port including Fujairah is not going to implement a practice to first encourage cruise ships to visit and then have a practice that effectively precludes the passengers from entering. 

DOES NOT PASS THE SMELL TEST. 

 

[Shmoo here]

4 minutes ago, Longwood50 said:

Common sense.

 

1.   If the passengers were able to enter Dubai airport with no eye screen they could easily travel by car to Fujairah and avoid any eye scan.

The eye scan requirement may have just been instituted.  Or the eye scan equipment in Fujairah may be less effective, taking longer to process.  You never know, unless, of course, you were actually in the port and could see it for yourself.

 

2. If eye scanning was required and as the captain stated would take all day, the cruise line would have known the requirement before selecting it as a port months before not 2 days before the ship was scheduled to arrive there Not if the requirement was implemented 2 days ago, or a week ago, or 2 weeks ago, or yesterday.

3. The assertion that the screening would take place outside in the hot sun is equally not plausible.  Even the UAE would not be setting up security equipment on the pier in the hot sun.  Certainly any port including Fujairah is not going to implement a practice to first encourage cruise ships to visit and then have a practice that effectively precludes the passengers from entering. How do you know what the UAE would set up? It could be a temporary set up, if it was recently implemented.  

DOES NOT PASS THE SMELL TEST. 

 

My responses in red above.

 

Me, personally, if a ship's captain made the decision to not make a port stop, I'd trust the captain more than my common sense.

[Longwood50]

4 minutes ago, Shmoo here said:

The eye scan requirement may have just been instituted.  Or the eye scan equipment in Fujairah may be less effective, taking longer to process.  You never know, unless, of course, you were actually in the port and could see it for yourself.

 

If you read my initial post, it asked IF ANYONE HAD BEEN TO THE PORT AND WAS THIS TRUE. 

 

The articles on eye scans in the UAE go back as far as 2005.  So whatever plans the UAE has for eye scanning are not a new idea.  The captain was the one who said the procedure would take all day and be completed in the hot sun.  Sounds bogus.  To repeat, if any passenger from any plane or ship wanted to get to Fujairah without an eye scan they could go to Dubai or Abu Dhabi.  In the Dubai airport NO EYE SCAN.  In Abu Dhabi the cruise passengers did not even have to go through any screen with immigration at all.  It sounds spurious that two days before a stop that suddenly this mysterious requirement is discovered.  Again to beat a dead horse, no port is going to encourage cruise passengers to visit it, then implement a procedure that is going to effectively preclude them from disembarking.  NOT COMMON SENSE. 
 

If there is a passenger on cruise critic who has been to Fujairah on a cruise ship and had to go through eye screening that will stop the conjecturing however, the very premise that Fujairah would implement something that would take all day just does not pass the smell test. 

[chengkp75]

So, according to your smell test, what is NCL's rationale for canceling the port?  Was it just to tick you off, or was there another, more nefarious reason?

[ilikeanswers]

5 hours ago, Longwood50 said:

Certainly any port including Fujairah is not going to implement a practice to first encourage cruise ships to visit and then have a practice that effectively precludes the passengers from entering.

 

You are applying Western capitalistic logic to an Islamic theocratic monarchy. You might be surprised to know for an Emirate like Fujairah the wants and comforts of tourists are not high on their lists of priorities so yes they will do things on a whim that will inconveniece tourism if the Emir thinks something else is more important. As someone else pointed out unpredictability is part and parcel of travelling in the Middle East.

[Longwood50]

1 hour ago, chengkp75 said:

So, according to your smell test, what is NCL's rationale for canceling the port?  Was it just to tick you off, or was there another, more nefarious reason

 

 

The rumor on the ship was that there were a significant contingent of passengers who had purchased a single entry visa into the UAE.  They were fine so long as the ship stayed in the UAE but the third port was Oman and then returned to Fujairah which would have required another visa and the UAE does not allow you to even stay on board if you don't have a visa.  I have no idea if it is true but again, if other cruisers have been to Fujairah and can attest to either being given an eye scan or not, it will end all of the conjecture. 

[ilikeanswers]

7 minutes ago, Longwood50 said:

The rumor on the ship was that there were a significant contingent of passengers who had purchased a single entry visa into the UAE.  They were fine so long as the ship stayed in the UAE but the third port was Oman and then returned to Fujairah which would have required another visa and the UAE does not allow you to even stay on board if you don't have a visa.  I have no idea if it is true but again, if other cruisers have been to Fujairah and can attest to either being given an eye scan or not, it will end all of the conjecture. 

 

That would depend on the nationality make up of the cruise ship passengers. To be honest that theory sounds more unlikely since statistically the nationalities that cruise the most are those who qualify for the UAE 30 or 90 day multiple entry visas on arrival so it I find it unlikely there would be that many passengers who would need a prearranged tourist visa, especially an amount that would make a cruise reconsider their itinerary and then again why would they lie about it? I can't see how it would negatively affect NCL if the reason was too many passengers with the wrong visa.

 

UAE Visa information

[Longwood50]

14 minutes ago, ilikeanswers said:

That would depend on the nationality make up of the cruise ship passengers. To be honest that theory sounds more unlikely since statistically the nationalities that cruise the most are those who qualify for the UAE 30 or 90 day multiple entry visas on arrival

Ilikeanswers the makeup of the passengers was from all over the world.  Irrespective a 14 day and 30 day visa can be issued as a single entry. (see attached)  The multi entry visas are more expensive.  I can easily see where a passenger could think that their visa was for 14 days covering the time in the UAE and never consider that when the ship left the UAE for Oman that the visa would not allow them to return to Fujairah.   Now if the ship kept its itinerary those passengers with a single entry would have had only two choices.  One to travel by land to Fujairah  and stay overnight and catch the ship there, or Two to fly from Oman to India which was going to be the next port after Fujairah  three days later.  None of those options would seem to be good and I can easily see that NCL might alter its itinerary if enough passengers were in that situation.  However, if that was the case, making up the eye scan as an excuse is not acceptable.  Just admit the situation and say the captain has made a decision for the good of the passengers. I find the visa scenario far more plausible than the eye scan excuse. 

[chengkp75]

2 hours ago, Longwood50 said:

 

 

The rumor on the ship was that there were a significant contingent of passengers who had purchased a single entry visa into the UAE.  They were fine so long as the ship stayed in the UAE but the third port was Oman and then returned to Fujairah which would have required another visa and the UAE does not allow you to even stay on board if you don't have a visa.  I have no idea if it is true but again, if other cruisers have been to Fujairah and can attest to either being given an eye scan or not, it will end all of the conjecture. 

If there were that significant a number of passengers with incorrect visas, and I doubt that NCL would have let them board in the first place with the incorrect visa, then it would have been resolved at Fujairah with the UAE immigration officials who would have, for a fee, provided the correct visas.  This would have taken time, and cost the passengers more than if they had obtained the visas originally, but would have been essentially not NCL's problem, so I don't see why they would have changed the itinerary.  Only those with the incorrect visas would have been inconvenienced.

[iancal]

We routinely get our fingers electronically fingerprinted when we enter certain countries.  Same with a digital facial image.  Sometime countries do both.  

 

They must have their reasons.   If we want to enter their country, we have to do this.  No issue for us.

[Floridiana]

17 hours ago, chengkp75 said:

So, according to your smell test, what is NCL's rationale for canceling the port?  Was it just to tick you off, or was there another, more nefarious reason?

 

Very funny. But I have heard similar stories on other ships  in other parts of the world with passengers accusing the captain of skipping a port on purpose or of giving false weather reports as a reason to skip a port to save money etc.. 

[Longwood50]

1 hour ago, Floridiana said:

So, according to your smell test, what is NCL's rationale for canceling the port?  Was it just to tick you off, or was there another, more nefarious reason?

Certainly the captain has the right to skip the port.  However, the excuse he gave just does not make any sense.  Fujairah  is listed on numerous posts as trying to encourage itself as a cruise port. To do that and then institute a practice that according to the captain's message would require an entire day for all passengers to go through the scan and be done in the hot sun is difficult to believe.  Add that to the fact that the port was cancelled two days before we were scheduled to arrive.  Again difficult to believe that NCL would not know Fujairah  had such a policy and not selected Fujairah  as a port to begin with. 

So far though there is a lot of conjecture, not a single person has said that they ported in Fujairah  and been subject to an eye scan.  I can attest to the fact that when we landed in Dubai and when we ported in Abu Dhabi also part of the UAE that there were no eye scans and in Abu Dhabi ships passengers did not even have to go through any sort of immigration check.  So the UAE has different rules for different ports?  Hard to believe.   I did hear directly from one passenger who was from Vietnam and on a single entry visa and it was him who volunteered that NCL had cancelled the port because he was one of many with single entry visa's 

[grayjay]

There WERE different rules for each of the UAE countries we visited 2 weeks ago, but they were not really bothersome because everything necessary regarding day visas etc. was provided by the ship and there wasn't a single eye scan during the cruise not even in Fujairah.But we now have quite a collection of stamps in our passports !

We had to hand in our passports quite often or they were kept at Guest Relations, and in some of the ports we were handed one-day immigration cards we had to give back to an official when re-entering port. In Abu Dhabi we had to appear in person in the terminal building to have one's passport checked and they obviously verified that everyone from passengers to crew had attended because one couple was called by name to appear.

Interesting enough almost every day our personal equipment ( bags etc., even my cane) were checked but always in a very efficient and polite way.

As European citizens we didn't have to have visas when entering Dubai as the starting-point of the cruise.