Open letter to Visa Waiver Program site

Dear ESTA (Electronic system for travel authorization) website.

 I really thank you for making my life miserable. But before that, I would like to congratulate you on dropping the support for Internet Explorer. It is a brave step and the implementation quite impressive -- waiting more than 20 seconds before you show me the site is more than IE's timeout on the connection.

But let us go back to the application itself. It was my pleasure to realize that although I need to fill in my country of birth, there is no such country (Czechoslovakia apparently did not exist 25 years ago). Well, I guess that concentrating on the history is too big effort. On the other hand, concentrating on the future where Slovakia does not exists (and virtually any other country including US) does not solve my current problem of travel authorization as well.

Moreover, I would expect that you make you mind -- is the phone number needed or not? And by the way, should I include leading zero for my number? Obviously the number itself cannot be used without that zero.

However, the most worrying fact is that I am not able even to fill in even the simplest questions like "the family name as it appears on your passport". Obviously, I cannot lie and use the name without accent marks as that is not what is on my passport!

As a final thought, one thing which is really baffling me is how do you manage redirecting 3 times in a row, most of the sites are not being able to do it properly a single time.


> wget "https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta/application.html?execution=e1s1"
--2012-03-15 18:07:49--  https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta/application.html?execution=e1s1
Resolving esta.cbp.dhs.gov (esta.cbp.dhs.gov)... 63.167.255.44
Connecting to esta.cbp.dhs.gov (esta.cbp.dhs.gov)|63.167.255.44|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta/application [following]
--2012-03-15 18:07:50--  https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta/application
Reusing existing connection to esta.cbp.dhs.gov:443.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta/application.html [following]
--2012-03-15 18:07:50--  https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta/application.html
Reusing existing connection to esta.cbp.dhs.gov:443.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta/application.html?execution=e1s1 [following]
--2012-03-15 18:07:51--  https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta/application.html?execution=e1s1
Reusing existing connection to esta.cbp.dhs.gov:443.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]


Yours sincirely,
  Visa Waiver Program applicant