I was surprised by the experience that my wife and myself had on a recent trip from India to Dubai. On June 11 we arrived in Dubai, waiting in line to get through passport control so that we could rest in our hotel since we had a 14 hour layover. We received our transit visa (which was pasted on our hotel voucher) from the currency exchange and waited almost one hour in line to have our passports stamped. When it was our turn to hand over our passport to the agent, we soon realized why it took so long. The young ladies who were working at the desk happened to be both "trainees" with limited English speaking abilities. Anyhow, they stamped our passports but discarded our hotel voucher into a locked box. When asked about the voucher, they made an effort to ask for the key to open the box. However, none of the other agents were willing to help find the key. Because of this, we were asked to go to the Customer Service desk to get a new hotel voucher and come back to the front of the line so that we could exit passport control without much problem. We went to customer service, explained our situation and issued a new voucher but we were told to get a new transit visa. We went again to the currency exchange to get the new visa and from there went back to passport control. When we reached the front of the line (which we were at 10 minutes ago) the ladies who had stamped our passport had left since there shift ended. We brought our concerns to neighboring agents who then told us to wait back in line. This was getting frustrating. We waited in line for an additional 20 minutes until the next agent arrived for his shift. When he called us to come forward, we explained to him what had happened but more importantly we told him we had already gone through passport control with our passports already stamped. This agent did not seem to have the time or patience to listen to what we were saying because he was stamping our passports anyways. My wife interrupted him again and told him that we had already had our passports stamped by the previous agent. After stamping our passports again, he realized what we were telling him and told us we can go. In summary, this passport control process took more time than was needed. We reached Dubai at 12:30 PM and left the airport 2:45 PM. We hope in the future that necessary steps will be taken by the part of Dubai International Airport to avoid such unnecessary delays or inconveniences.
