In our wisdom we decided to fly home British Airways out of Gatwick – getting to Gatwick from Nice via EasyJet (as an aside, Easyjet allowed us to check in for our flight a month ahead of time instead of the usual 24 hours). Yesterday we received an email from Easyjet telling us to make sure we had our UK Electronic Travel Authorization with a link to the web site where we learned that we were to pay £20 each for the privilege of going through the UK.
The web site recommends that you use the ETA mobile app. If you do a search for UK mobile app in the app store for the iPhone the first app you see is one called UK ETA Visa Services with a look very much like that shown on the UK government web site. It gets a rating of 4.6 with 169 reviews. That’s the only app that shows up if you do a search of the app store in the iPad. Once you get in, the app gives you a test as to whether you need a VISA or an ETA. In our case it decides we need an ETA but then it give you three choices £55 if you need the ETA within 7 business days, £89 if you need it within 3 business days and £136 if you need it within 24 hours.
Ok so I’m not always the most astute traveler but even I know that there is something wrong when the government web site says the cost is £20 and an app tells me it is going to cost 3-7 times as much. So I go back to the iPhone app store and there is another app below the more popular app. It is just called UK ETA and has an icon of a crown. It gets a rating of 2.6 with 208 reviews. That as it turns out is the correct app so we go through the somewhat gruelling process as required by the app, pay our £20 each and our applications are approved within minutes.
I remain completely confused. The rip-off app gets a rating of 4.6 while the correct app gets a rating of 2.6. So all these people preferred to be ripped off because presumably they had a more enjoyable experience paying 3-7 times as much as the people that hated using the correct app.
The other thought that comes to mind is that Apple provides little to no oversight for the apps on their app store – allowing all these blissfully ignorant people to be scammed and then promoting the scamming app so that it shows up first in a search so as to suck in even more blissfully ignorant people.
WR Foster 