smartraveller.gov.au - Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
It's a must see destination.
It's a must see destination.
2. Take out appropriate travel insurance to cover hospital treatment, medical evacuation and any activities, including adventure sports, in which you plan to participate.
Australians are keen travellers and take around six million trips overseas each year. Many Australians also live abroad. Travelling or living overseas can be exciting and rewarding, but can also carry potential risks. Each year, approximately 30,000 Australians require consular assistance from us or our overseas missions.
To help Australians avoid difficulties overseas, we maintain travel advisories for more than 160 destinations overseas. Our travel advice provides accurate, up-to-date information about the risks Australians might face overseas, assisting you to make well-informed decisions about whether, when and where to travel. We recommend reading our destination-specific travel advisories for the country of your destination. If you are living or travelling overseas we also recommend that you subscribe to receive free automatic email notification each time the travel advice for your selected destination/s is updated. That way you can ensure that you have the latest information.
We also recommend you register your travel and contact details, so we can contact you in an emergency. It is also important to organise comprehensive travel insurance and check the circumstances and activities that are not covered by your policy.
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Travel advisories are just that: advice. They are not warnings and they are not mandatory. In addition to information about security, the travel advisories provide useful, practical tips on travelling such as health, local laws, local customs and entry and exit requirements. We do not and cannot make decisions for you about whether, when or where you should travel. The decision to travel is a personal responsibility and Australians are responsible for their own safety. Our travel advisories aim to help you make your own well-informed travel decisions.
In issuing travel advice we do not 'single out' countries. Rather, we maintain a travel advice on most countries that are popular destinations for Australians in all regions of the world. Travel advice - like on-line registration of your travel details and travel insurance - are tools to help you avoid difficulties while travelling. We recommend all Australians check the travel advice for their destinations, both before leaving Australia and while travelling. You can subscribe to the travel advice for any destination, at no charge, to receive email notification each time the travel advice is updated.
All Australian travellers and Australians living overseas should read the travel advisories. The travel advisories provide current and important information on safety and security, as well as other topics such as health issues and local laws, which assist Australians travelling or living overseas to make informed decisions.
There are five different levels of advice. The level we give a country reflects our overall assessment of the security situation in the destination and is designed to help you assess the level of risk you would face in that country.
In determining the level of a destination we consider the security risks and compare these to the general security threats in a large Australian city. We also take into account the capacity of a foreign government to deal with the risks. We don't employ strict formulas. At times our advice may not fit exactly within one of the levels - in these cases we will explain a specific situation and provide the most practical advice.
The five levels are as follows:
There is a continuum bar at the top of each travel advice to help you quickly establish the relative level of each destination. In some advisories, there is more than one continuum because while the overall country is at a certain level, different regions within the country are assessed to be at higher or lower levels.
We take the preparation of travel advice is taken very seriously. We draw on a range of sources of information, including:
We are committed to providing information about credible and specific threats.
When necessary, we will also liaise with other Government departments and agencies to ensure that the information we provide is as useful as possible for Australian travellers.
The information in our travel advice is as current as we can possibly make it. Travel advisories are kept under constant review but as a matter of course every travel advice is reviewed and reissued every quarter. If developments in a country require more regular updates we will respond through the travel advice.
Our Consular Emergency Centre, which operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and our network of missions overseas, provide us with regular updates of security and related developments around the world. Travel advice is updated promptly in response to these developments, and that is why we encourage Australians not only to read travel advice before they leave, but also to monitor it carefully while they are travelling through our subscription service.
Travel advice is not however, updated simply to reflect the fact that a security incident overseas has occurred. We are not a news service that reports on all incidents. The travel advice may contain examples of security incidents from the recent past but these serve as an example of the sorts of threats mentioned in the advice. When security incidents occur overseas, we assess the risk to Australians travellers - if the level of risk has not changed, the travel advice will not be changed.
If you subscribe to the travel advisories for the destinations you will be visiting, you will receive alerts to your email address each time the travel advice for one of your destinations is reissued. If the travel advice changes significantly (for example the overall level of the advice is raised) the Australian Embassy, High Commission or Consulate responsible for that destination will send the information to all registered people in that destination.
This is why we strongly recommend that you subscribe to the travel advisories and register your travel and contact details.
No. We produce only one form of advice, in the form of the travel advisories. An important principle behind our work is that the advice we provide to you is exactly the advice we provide to our own staff, to other government agencies or to the private sector.
We operate on a strict principle of no double standards: that is, our best advice is the advice that is made available to the general public in our travel advisories. We do not reserve privileged information for others - be they our own staff or for other government officials. You can be confident that the information and advice we provide reflects our best assessment of the safety and security issues you may face in a particular country.
As part of this commitment, if we withdraw staff from overseas because of security concerns or increased security measures to protect them, wherever possible we will include this in the travel advice so that the decisions we make about our own staff welfare are transparent to the wider community.
If you phone us, we will not be able to add to the advice that is published on this site. That is our most up-to-date advice and we cannot, and should not, predict what will happen in the future.
Travel advice is just that: advice. It is not mandatory and travel decisions are your own personal responsibility. You should consider our travel advice a tool to help you gather information when deciding whether to travel.
From time to time, we will produce issue-specific, event-specific or region-wide travel bulletins (such as H1N1 Influenza 09, ANZAC Day, or a bulletin regarding a natural disaster which has affected a certain area or several countries). Bulletins may also be used to provide information on significant events in destinations where no travel advisory exists.
In general, details about events (such as Oktoberfest in Germany or Carnivale in Brazil) are reflected in the travel advisory for each particular country. However, a travel bulletin may also be created and travellers are strongly encouraged to read any travel bulletin in conjunction with the relevant travel advisory, which remains the primary source on safety and security risks. You can subscribe to the travel bulletins, at no charge, to receive email notification each time a current travel bulletin is updated or a new travel bulletin is created.