When AI Gets Your Visa Wrong: Cases From 2025–2026
At Legal Indonesia, we consult clients on visas every day, and we keep seeing the same pattern: before a trip, someone opens an AI chat instead of the embassy's official website and asks whether they need a visa. The answer comes back in seconds and sounds confident.
Over the past year, several of those answers turned out to be wrong. People ended up turning back at the airport, scrambling to change tickets, and losing money. Here are three cases, and what they mean for anyone planning a visa today, including for Indonesia.
Puerto Rico: It Wasn't the Visa, It Was the ESTA
On August 15, 2025, a story about a Spanish couple went viral: they were denied boarding on their flight to Puerto Rico. According to the couple, they had asked an AI chatbot before the trip whether they needed a visa and were told no.
Technically, the answer wasn't entirely false. Spanish citizens don't need a visa to enter Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. What they do need is an ESTA, the electronic travel authorization required for citizens of Visa Waiver Program countries entering the U.S. The AI never mentioned that requirement, and the couple only found out about it at check-in.
The mistake here wasn't a wrong fact. It was an incomplete answer: the question was about a visa, the answer was about a visa, but the one requirement that actually stopped them from flying never made it in.
North Macedonia: A Visa Question That Cost 50,000 Rubles
On June 15, 2026, a large Russian family was planning a trip to North Macedonia. Before buying tickets, the father asked an AI chatbot whether Russian citizens needed a visa and was told no documentation was required.
At check-in in Istanbul, airline staff asked for a visa or an electronic permit, reportedly required for Russian citizens since March 2022. The family had to change their route on the spot and fly to Bosnia and Herzegovina instead, which is visa-free for Russian citizens. This time, they confirmed that on the official government website first. The failed trip cost the family 50,000 rubles.
Tellingly, the backup plan only worked because it was checked against a primary source instead of the same chatbot.
Chile: The Visa the AI Missed
On March 27, 2025, an Australian traveler asked an AI chatbot whether he needed a visa for Chile and got a confident no. He bought his ticket. He never flew.
At the airport, he learned the visa had to be arranged in advance through the embassy's website, a process that takes up to 20 days. The problem was outdated information: Australian citizens could enter Chile visa-free for up to 90 days until the end of 2019, but the rules changed after that. The AI's answer appears to have stayed frozen at the older policy.
This is a case where the question was fine and the answer was fine, just for the wrong year. Official sources don't have that problem: they always reflect today's rules, not last decade's.
Why AI Gets Visa Questions Wrong
None of these three stories is really about a technical glitch. They're about how AI answers this specific type of question.
Models are trained on data with a cutoff date. Visa rules change faster than that underlying knowledge gets refreshed, so an answer can be correct for 2019 and wrong for 2025. A short question like "do I need a visa" also works against accuracy on its own: the real answer depends on nationality, purpose of travel, length of stay, and the legal status of the destination, and a generalized response doesn't always account for all of that at once, as the Puerto Rico case shows.
There's also the matter of tone. AI delivers answers with the same confidence regardless of how certain the underlying information actually is, and that confidence is easy to mistake for verification from an official source. When the answer turns out to be wrong, the traveler is the one left to deal with it: no chatbot refunds a plane ticket or reissues a visa.
The Same Risk Applies to Indonesian Visas
Indonesia's entry rules change throughout the year too. The list of countries eligible for visa-free entry or e-VOA, KITAS categories, and extension conditions are all set by regulations that get updated several times a year. A confident-sounding but generalized AI answer here can go stale or miss a requirement in exactly the same way as in the Puerto Rico, North Macedonia, and Chile cases.
At the border or during a visa extension, the cost of that kind of mistake is worse than a ruined itinerary: it can mean a fine, deportation, or being blacklisted from future entry.
How to Check Visa Requirements Properly
Check the official website of the embassy, consulate, or immigration authority of your destination country. That's the primary source, not a blog or an aggregator site.
Confirm requirements with your airline. Airlines are responsible for boarding passengers without the right documents, and that's usually where the problem surfaces first, at check-in.
Treat an AI answer as a starting point, not as the final word before you buy a ticket.
For Indonesia specifically, talk to specialists who work with visa regulations daily and track every change.
If you're planning a visa, a KITAS, or an extension of stay in Indonesia and you're not sure the information you found, including from an AI, is current, get in touch. We'll check the requirements for your specific situation and tell you what to arrange in advance. It costs less time, stress, and money than sorting things out after the fact, and those are hard to get back once a flight is missed.
Director of Legal Indonesia
Patrecia Christy
