• The Turkish Embassy in Pretoria says South Africans can once again get e-visas.
• This follows Turkey suddenly excluding them from its e-visas online platform.
• The embassy said on Friday night that the “technical problem” had been resolved.
• For more stories, go to www.BusinessInsider.co.za.

The Turkish Embassy in Pretoria says South Africans can once again get e-visas to get into that country.

This follows Turkey (the country has recently changed its name to Türkiye) excluding South Africans from its e-visas online platform from 6 July 2022.

In several Tweets, the Turkish Embassy said on Friday night that: “The technical problem was resolved tonight, and the e-visa website is back online. Apologies for the inconvenience caused.”

Though no reasons were publicly given for what the technical issues were, travel agency Flight Centre said it was told that that the issue was temporary.

“We had received feedback from the Turkish Embassy that the Electronic Visa Application System or ‘e-visa’ online system had been temporarily disabled for applicants,” said Flight Centre, customer experience team leader, Lynette Machiri.

Previously, when South Africans tried to apply viva the online system, they were told:

“Unfortunately, nationals of the country that you selected are not eligible for e-Visa. Kindly visit the nearest Turkish mission to apply for a visa application. Please visit http://www.visa.gov.tr for the full list of the Turkish Embassies and Consulates.”

Turkey is a popular tourism destination for South Africans. This can be seen in the number of South Africans visiting Turkey rising from 24,402 in 2008 to 74,652 in 2018.

The Covid-19 crisis, however, has seen a big downturn with only 12,251 visiting in 2019 and 6,088 visiting in 2020.