The folder is ready. Six months of bank statements, the leave letter, a hotel confirmation covering all eleven nights. Then you open the Vietnamese e-visa portal and it asks you to upload two files, and neither of them is in the folder.
What a Vietnam e-visa application actually contains
Twelve countries are waved through. India is not one of them
The Embassy of Viet Nam in India publishes the unilateral exemption list, and it is short: Russia, Japan, South Korea, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain and Italy, running from 15-03-2025 to 14-03-2028. An Indian passport draws none of it. Whatever the length or the purpose of the trip, you arrive with a visa or you do not board.
There is one island-shaped exception, stated on the same embassy page: Vietnam “grants visa exemption to foreigners entering Phu Quoc from abroad for a stay of up to 30 days; this also applies to those transiting through an international checkpoint in Vietnam (by air or sea) before continuing to Phu Quoc Island.” Read what that sentence covers — a stay on Phu Quoc. It says nothing about a week in Hanoi bolted on afterwards. If your plan has a mainland night in it, this is not the route you are on.
Three working days. Or thirty. Vietnam publishes both numbers
The Immigration Department’s e-visa page is brisk: “Your application will be processed in 3 working days.” The Embassy of Viet Nam in New Delhi, describing the same application to the same applicants, writes that an e-visa “is processed within 05 – 30 working days after the Vietnam Immigration Department receives the completed application and full e-Visa fee.”
One government, two answers, six weeks apart at the extremes. Plan against the longer one.
The fee sharpens it. Twenty-five US dollars for a single entry, fifty for multiple, and the portal states plainly that the fee will not be refunded if the application is refused; the embassy’s version is blunter still — payments are non-refundable. So the money is spent whichever way the decision lands, and the decision may take five days or six weeks.
That spread is the whole argument against buying a fare first. You get dates firm enough to file a leave application against, and nothing to argue about with an airline if the e-visa lands in week five.
None of which improves your odds. The Immigration Department is not reading your travel plan; it is reading two uploads and a form. What a held reservation buys is the ability to make commitments that survive a six-week answer — a leave application with real dates on it, a tour operator who wants a confirmed arrival, a parent timing their own trip around yours.
- Passport data page
- Portrait, no glasses
- Name from the ICAO line
- Address in Vietnam
- Intended entry date
- Entry and exit checkpoint
- Flight booking
- Hotel confirmation
- Travel insurance
The name that counts is the one in the strip at the bottom
The instruction on the embassy’s e-visa page is one line: “Write your full name in the same order as it appears in the ICAO line in the bottom of your passport data page.” Not the way your name is printed above it. The machine-readable strip.
Indian passports are where that bites hardest. Surname fields left blank, a father’s name carried as an initial, a given name long enough to be truncated, a two-line name that the strip flattens into chevrons. People type what the printed page shows, the strip says something slightly different, and the Immigration Department’s rule covers the rest: “If there is any missing or incorrect/unidentified information, your application will not be accepted.” The fee does not come back with it.
The address field is the one place a real booking does work
Vietnam does not want your hotel confirmation. It wants an address, typed — and it keeps track of what happens at that address. The Immigration Department runs an online temporary-residence declaration system for foreigners, split province by province, so where a visitor sleeps is a record the state maintains rather than a line on a form nobody opens again.
An address invented to fill a box works right up to the moment you land without one. That is the honest reason to hold a confirmed booking for a Vietnam trip: not to attach it to an application that has no slot for it, but so the address you declared belongs to a property that knows your name when you reach Hanoi at eleven at night.
One address is all the form takes, even when the trip runs Hanoi to Hoi An to Ho Chi Minh City across three properties. Give it the first one — the place you sleep on the night you land — because that is the address that has to be true at the moment anybody checks it.
Hanoi in, Saigon out — and the checkpoint you name is not a lock
The form asks for the entry checkpoint and the exit checkpoint as two separate answers, which fits how Vietnam is actually travelled from India. Land at Noi Bai, work south through Ha Long Bay, Hoi An and Da Nang, fly home from Tan Son Nhat. The reservation that matches that is an open jaw — Delhi to Hanoi outbound, Ho Chi Minh City back — rather than a return into one city plus an internal flight invented afterwards to make the paperwork agree with itself.
Then the part that surprises people, in the embassy’s own words: “E-Visa holders can enter and exit Vietnam through any checkpoint in 42 international checkpoints. You need to determine the entry checkpoint when applying evisa. Your actual entry checkpoint does not have to match the entry checkpoint determined when filling the evisa application.” A great deal of advice aimed at Indian travellers says the opposite.
What is binding is the date window. You nominate an intended entry date, the e-visa is issued valid for a period of up to 90 days, single or multiple entry, and you may cross any time inside it. Pushing a trip later is usually survivable. Pulling it forward is not — arrive a week early and you arrive before your own visa exists. Print it, too: the embassy says you must have a physical copy when you land.
Then walk past the visa-on-arrival desk. The embassy’s own answer is that e-visa holders “do not need to queue at Visa on Arrival counters” and can take the printed e-visa and the passport straight to the immigration counter. At Noi Bai and Tan Son Nhat the two lines sit close enough together that first-time arrivals join the wrong one and stand in it.
The site charging you US$25 may not be the government
Since 08:00 on 11-11-2024 the Vietnamese e-visa portal has run on exactly two domains, thithucdientu.gov.vn and evisa.gov.vn. The Embassy in New Delhi puts it in capitals on its own e-visa page: ALL OTHER WEBSITES ARE INVALID.
It also keeps a standing warning page listing look-alike sites, because this is the single most reliable way an Indian traveller loses money on a Vietnam trip. “Several un-official, un-authorised private websites try to mimic an official website of the Government of Vietnam to sell their services,” it reads — and the embassy states that it does not assume any responsibility for applicants who are denied boarding and entry to Vietnam after using them.
We sell reservations. We do not lodge e-visas, and there is no version of this where you should pay anyone else to either: it is a form, two uploads and a card payment on a .gov.vn address.
Who the portal will not take, and where the result actually appears
Three conditions sit at the top of the Immigration Department’s e-visa page and almost everybody skims past them: you must be outside Vietnam when you apply, you must hold a valid passport, and you must not fall within the suspension cases in Article 21 of the immigration law. A separate note adds that people covered by certain clauses of Article 8 may not apply on the website at all and have to be invited by an agency or organisation in Vietnam.
If something has gone wrong and no screen explains it, the embassy publishes the contact that reaches a person: foreigners@immigration.gov.vn, or the hotline +84-24-3826-4026.
When Chandragupta Marg is the right counter instead
Not every Vietnam file belongs on the portal. The Immigration Department notes that some applicants may not apply for an e-visa through the website at all and must come through an inviting agency in Vietnam. For those, and for the longer categories, the Embassy in New Delhi issues a sticker visa across the counter.
- What it takes: one application form in the provided format with the photo attached, the original passport with more than six months’ validity and a blank page, two colour photographs, and the visa approval document if you are travelling on an invitation or a sponsor.
- How long: NG1 and NG2 within 3 working days; other visa types within 5 working days. Fees are non-refundable here as well.
- Where and when: EP-7A, Chandragupta Marg, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi-110021. No appointment. Submissions Monday 10:30–11:30 and Tuesday to Friday 09:30–11:30; collections 16:00–17:30.
One last thing to settle before you pay rather than after: an e-visa can be extended, but only from inside Vietnam, and only by asking an agency, organisation or relative there to guarantee your stay. If the trip is already shaped like two entries — a run across to Cambodia or Laos and back — the fifty-dollar multiple-entry option is a decision you make once, on the form.
Fees, timings, the exemption list and every quotation above were read on 04-09-2026 at the Viet Nam Immigration Department portal and the Embassy of Viet Nam in India, linked below. Vietnamese entry rules and exemption periods are revised by resolution and change without notice — confirm at those sources before you rely on anything here. Nothing on this page predicts the outcome of an application.