Tag: e-visa

Is it best to get a Vietnam E-Visa online before you travel to this SE Asian country, or is a Visa on Arrival, with a letter of acceptance all that is needed? I’ll include a few pictures from the start of our trip to Vietnam so you can see why it is worth getting a visa to this beautiful country.

When do I need a visa?

This question came up a few times in the last several months as we prepared for our trip to a new country. What is expected when a traveller arrives depends on the country. The rules depend on what passport you hold and what you plan to do in the country as a tourist or as a business person.

When we visit the United States as a Canadian tourist, all we need is a valid passport. A visa is not required. A 30-day visit to Thailand is just another stamp in your passport. Laos, Cambodia, and Nepal require  $42, $35 and $25 paid in US dollars and a special visa application form completed upon arrival. It takes about 10 minutes to process the visa and it is stuck into your passport.

Visa for India

India requires a visa to be completed ahead of time, either at the Embassy or online as an e-visa. Rather than take a day off work to visit the Embassy in person, submit my documents and have a personal interview, an e-visa seemed the easiest option.

The cheapest one used a government site. It asked many questions including your parents’ names and birthplaces. It worked fine right up until the payment process when it said there was an error and quit. After the second try, I recorded the number they gave so I didn’t have to re-enter all my information. Even after I contacted their contact information, I could not complete the payment of my e-visa on this website.

A commercial India e-visa site had my documents to me in within a week. I printed the visa but when I forgot my paperwork at home (it could happen to anyone), the page could be printed from the email available on my phone. When arriving in Delhi, the e-visa line was separate from the regular visa line and took less time to be processed.

Visa for Vietnam

Vietnam requires a visa for all tourists. You can apply online to the Vietnamese Embassy in Ottawa in Canada. You send them the application, a scan of your passport and a passport-type picture. They mail you a visa once your payment and application are approved. The cost in November 2018 was $25 US. 

Again, everything worked fine until I tried to upload our pictures and they weren’t approved because our ears weren’t showing. I didn’t have any other “official passport pictures” but I could probably have taken some myself and used those instead.

Letter of approval

If you search “Visa to Vietnam from Canada” in Google, the first page only refers to applying for a letter of approval for a visa. Our daughter took this route. You complete an application with your name, date of birth and passport number. The fee is $17 US. The company sends you a form to complete and an approval letter with your name, date of birth and passport number. The same approval letter is sent to everyone who was approved on the same day. It includes everyone’s name, birth date and passport information which seemed rather odd.

When she arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, there were 24 lines of about 50 people in each waiting to go through immigration. There was one ASEAN line, but no line just for Vietnamese. Luckily she entered the Visa on Arrival line first. We heard of another traveller who got all the way to the front of the immigration line with his approval letter, only to be sent all the way back to the Visa line.

She submitted the completed form, the letter of approval, her passport and another $25 US to the Visa department. And then she waited for an hour and 15 minutes. Immigration returned her passport with the visa and she could now enter the regular immigration line. That took another 30 minutes. Luckily we didn’t have a connecting flight.

Vietnam e-visa

A Vietnam e-visa has been available since February 2017. It appeared at the bottom of my visa Google search page under related searches. Even when I clicked on it, it was another half a page before any information was available. The site I eventually found and used was the Vietnam Immigration Portal.

I submitted my name, birth date, and passport information as well as scanned my passport, scanned the same photo I tried unsuccessfully to use on the Embassy site and paid $25US.  Within 3 days I had a page to print, which I did not leave at home this time. 

We entered the immigration line and although it took some time because of all the people, we had no trouble entering Vietnam. We only needed our passport and the Vietnam e-visa paper.

And the winner is…

My experience is that a Vietnam e-visa is fast and easy to obtain and can save you hours at the airport.