Vietnam visitor visa from India

The Vietnamese government fee is US$25 for a single-entry e-Visa and US$50 for multiple entry, about ₹2,380 and ₹4,760. It is paid online during the application and is not refunded if the application is refused. Through us it is ₹3,000 all-inclusive. The official portal is evisa.gov.vn, and it is worth knowing the real figures before you start, because a number of commercial sites with official-sounding names and government-looking layouts charge several times the government fee for the same application. Vietnam is one of the worst routes for this, partly because the fee is low enough that an inflated one still looks reasonable to somebody who has not checked. If a site is quoting you US$90 for a tourist e-Visa, it is not the government and it is not doing anything you could not do yourself in twenty minutes.

Up to 90 days. Vietnam extended the e-Visa from 30 to 90 days and added a multiple-entry option in August 2023, and opened the scheme to citizens of every country at the same time. A lot of guidance still in circulation describes a 30-day single-entry visa, which was the position before that change and has been wrong for years, so check the date on anything you read about this route. One detail matters more than the length: you nominate your intended entry date when you apply, and you cannot enter Vietnam before it. That means an early arrival is not permitted even though the visa exists, and a change of flight to an earlier day can leave you holding a visa that is not yet usable. Pick the date carefully and build a little slack after it rather than before.

Around three to five working days in normal periods. It runs longer around Tet, the Vietnamese new year, and through the summer peak, when applications can take a week and a half or more and no amount of following up moves them. Plan around the busy periods rather than the normal ones if your trip falls in either. There is a useful quirk in how this visa works that removes most of the pressure: because it is tied to the entry date you nominate rather than to the date it is issued, applying early does not eat into your permitted stay the way it would on other routes. So there is no reason to wait. Apply as soon as your dates are settled, and the extra fortnight costs you nothing except the certainty of having it done.

Not if you arrive on a direct international flight to Phu Quoc and stay on the island, in which case you can stay up to 30 days without a visa. You do need one if you connect through Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi or any other mainland airport, because clearing immigration there means entering Vietnam proper and the island exemption no longer applies. That distinction is where the exemption falls apart for most Indian travellers. Most affordable routings from India connect through the mainland, so the rule that reads as a generous exception in a headline applies to far fewer people than it appears to. Check the actual itinerary rather than the destination before deciding you need nothing. If the ticket touches Ho Chi Minh City, you are applying for an e-Visa like everybody else.

Mostly on the two uploads rather than on anything to do with eligibility, which is why a rejection here usually feels arbitrary and usually is not. The passport scan must show the two lines of machine-readable code at the bottom of the data page fully and legibly, and phone photographs taken at an angle routinely cut them off or blur them past the point a system can read. The photograph must have a plain white background and no glasses, and Vietnam rejects photographs with glasses even when there is no glare at all, so a picture that passed elsewhere is not evidence it will pass here. Mismatched personal details between the form and the passport, and insufficient passport validity, make up most of the rest. All four are fixable in advance and none of them are judgements about you.

A single-entry e-Visa cannot be extended. If you need longer, or you need to leave Vietnam and come back, there are two options and both are decisions taken before you are under time pressure. You can apply for a multiple-entry e-Visa before you travel, which is the cleaner answer and costs US$50 rather than US$25. Or you can apply for an extension through a local immigration office in Vietnam before your current visa expires, which is possible and is not guaranteed. The practical answer is to choose the right visa type at the start rather than planning to fix it from inside the country, because an extension refused with four days left is a flight change and a scramble rather than an inconvenience. Think about whether the trip might include a hop to Cambodia or Laos before you pick.