Before booking flight tickets: What is the difference between a business visit and a commercial visit

The business visit and commercial visa offer various opportunities for individuals, so many wonder what is the difference between a business visit and a commercial visit. There are important differences between them. A business visit and a commercial visit differ in terms of the purpose and scope covered by each type.

Purpose of visit:

Business visit: Related to work or job-related activities, such as business meetings or training.

Commercial visit: Focuses on business activities, such as negotiating business contracts or seeking new business opportunities.

Duration:

Business visit: It may be for a short or long period, depending on the nature of the work.

Commercial visit: Often for a limited period and focused on specific business objectives.

Activities:

Business visit: This may include formal meetings, workshops, training, and presentations.

Commercial visit: This may include visiting trade shows, customer meetings, and promoting products or services.

visa:

Both a business visit and a commercial visit may require a special visa, depending on the country and local laws.

Terms and restrictions:

Business visit: This may include restrictions related to work or job role.

Commercial visit: Focuses on business activities and negotiation.

Preparations:

Business visit: May require preparations for formal meetings and negotiation.

Commercial visit: This may require preparations to promote products or services.

Justifications for the commercial visit

Business and commercial visits are vital aspects of companies. In this context, we will explore the justifications for a commercial visit below:

• Network Expansion and Relationship Development: Provides the opportunity to build and strengthen business relationships with potential clients and partners.
• Market and competition analysis: enabling companies to examine the local market, and understand the needs of customers and competitors.
• Promoting products or services: An opportunity to market innovative products or services, and explain their benefits to customers.
• Contracting and negotiation: The possibility of holding negotiated talks and signing commercial agreements or partnerships.
• Providing technical support and customer service: Providing an opportunity to provide technical support and respond to customer inquiries.
• Visit branches or subsidiaries: inspect branches or subsidiaries, and provide administrative support and guidance.
• Evaluating market effectiveness: examining the efficiency of marketing strategies, and evaluating the market response to products or services.
• Brand Marketing: An opportunity to highlight the brand and enhance awareness of it.
• Verifying compliance with agreements: Verifying that business partners adhere to agreed-upon agreements and terms.
• Promoting innovation and development: An opportunity to talk about new technologies or innovative products and attract the interest of partners.

Categories of entry visas for commercial visit

There are several categories of entry visas for a commercial visit in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia:

• Investors and businessmen: Commercial institutions and investors can obtain visas to conduct their business in the Kingdom.
• Trade Representatives: Individuals who represent foreign companies can obtain a visa to meet business partners or participate in trade events.
• Engineers and technicians: Individuals with technical competencies can obtain a visa to work on technical and industrial projects.
• Diplomatic passport holders: Individuals with diplomatic passports can obtain a business visit visa without paying a fee.
• Businesswomen: Women who travel to meet business partners or participate in business events.

Steps for issuing commercial visit visas

Commercial visit visas can be requested and issued by following the following steps:

• Access the electronic visa services platform of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs through the link
• Through the platform, we select the organizations and sectors icon, which opens a page that includes government agencies
• Click on the option Company or institution within the Kingdom, and from there you must choose a business visit request.

What are the stages and procedures for requesting a business visit?

To obtain a work visit request, the request must pass through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs electronic portal through five stages, which we will mention in order:

Firstly, an important warning appears in the first stage, stating that the entity requesting a work visit must take into account several matters when entering the application, the most important of which are:

• Writing the names of people from non-Arab countries in Latin letters and matching the names in passports
• The possibility of writing the names of those wanted for a visit in one application, with the possibility of different nationalities among those wanted for a work visit
• The application must be authenticated electronically by the Chamber of Commerce and the application must be followed up on the Ministry’s website.

Secondly – We move to implement the procedures of the second stage after clicking on Next, where we move to the data of the requesting party

• Complete entering the required data and then click Next.
• Electronic visa services
• Request a visit

Third: Application data is the third stage of requesting a business visit

By clicking on the question mark in the purpose of the visit box, we can explain the justifications for the visit to the Kingdom in detail, then click on Next.

Fourth – In the fourth stage of requesting a work visit, which is the visitor data stage

You must enter the code shown on the page, then click Add. Here, a page will appear containing fields that must be filled in with information pertaining to the person or persons to be invited to the visit.

At this stage, we must add a photo of the passport, the email of the person we want to invite, and the mobile number

In the visa data fields, the destination of arrival must be specified, the visa validity period is set at 365 days by default, and the duration of stay is set at 90 days.

In the Number of Entry Times field, it is possible to specify multiple trips or choose one trip. Here, the validity period of the visa changes to 90 days and the duration of stay changes to 30 days only.

Fifth – The business visit visa service allows for evaluating the service and the extent of the customer’s satisfaction with the service provided

With this step, the visit request service or commercial visa service has been completed, and the application number and its barcode appear on the request data page.