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The Online Nonimmigrant Visa Application (DS-160) asks:

Have you traveled to any countries/regions within the last five years?

Do I need to put the Countries/Regions I’ve visited via a Cruise Ship, even though I wasn’t required to clear Customs to visit these Destinations for about 6-8 hours?

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  • I believe the cruise line handles customs/immigration for port calls, therefore best to disclose the information tripadvisor.com/…
    – Traveller
    Commented Nov 3, 2020 at 9:44
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    If the question is literally "Have you traveled to XYZ..." And you've been to XYZ, then the answer is "Yes". They didn't ask for how you got there, who stamped your passport, etc. Simply, did you travel there?
    – BruceWayne
    Commented Nov 3, 2020 at 15:22
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    Don't answer in comments; post those as answers instead. Comments are for requesting clarification or suggesting improvements to the question itself.
    – V2Blast
    Commented Nov 4, 2020 at 0:09
  • @BruceWayne To be fair it's not particularly 'simple'. If I travel from France to the Netherlands, did I travel to Belgium? Or does altitude matter (bus vs car)? Or what about a 10 minute break Neum, Bosnia from Croatia to Croatia. I think it's fairly 'obvious' that travelling by air through a country probably doesn't count for this question, and travelling by cruise ship without entering a country is somewhat similar. Still agree that I wouldn't risk it and I would mention all countries I travelled through by ship, but I doubt a literal interpretation is particularly trivial or simple.
    – David Mulder
    Commented Nov 4, 2020 at 13:43

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Yes, if you visited those countries, you should include them on lists of countries that you've visited. While, as a practical matter, it might be the case that nobody ends up caring either way, it is always better to put the information than to leave it out and potentially get in trouble for failing to include it.

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Do the best you can. I provided a list of about a dozen countries that I still could remember and added a disclaimer "This is our best estimate based on an anaylysis of past travel records". That seemed to work fine.

It would be good to go through your passport and make sure that all stamps that are in there are covered in the list.

Make also sure you are dilligent about any country the US may consider as problematic (North Korea, Iran, Iraq, etc.)

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even though I wasn’t required to clear Customs to visit these Destinations for about 6-8 hours?

Regarding the trip duration: I'm not familiar with DS 160 but I am with the N-400 Application for Naturalization Form (mirror), which does specify a minimum duration for a trip to be included in the travel history (without any condition on clearing customs):

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Therefore, if the DS 160 doesn't specify any minimum duration, then I assume we're supposed to list all visited countries regardless of duration.

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    Notice that is "trips of 24 hours or more which included any travel outside the USA, no matter how split among other countries" and not "countries visited for 24 hours or more". Assuming that the OP's cruise lasted more than 24 hours, then every country visited during that trip is subject to listing, even if time spent in that particular country was less than a whole day.
    – Ben Voigt
    Commented Nov 4, 2020 at 16:36

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