Permits we cover
Official fees, checked against each government's own portal. Where a struck-through figure appears, that is what agencies charge for the identical document. It is left blank rather than estimated where we have not checked it.
Travelling from the United StatesRequired. A separate arrival form became mandatory in 2026 and most guides omit it.
Required again since April 2025, after six years of visa-free travel. Valid ten years.
No e-visa exists. Single entry costs the same as the ten-year, so never ask for single.
Required. The photo must be square, and India still expects a printed copy at immigration.
Not in operation. The European Commission collects no applications, so nobody can issue one.
Free and mandatory. Thai Immigration has publicly warned about copies that charge for it.
US citizens and green card holders are exempt. There is no eTA record to create.
The visa was abolished in 2024. The form will not finish without a confirmed hotel booking.
Required. Validity is 90 days and the stay is 30. They are two different clocks.
Written for German travellers. The national identification number asked for is the Personalausweisnummer.
Written for Spanish travellers. Some guides still quote the old $21 fee.
Written for Italian travellers, including the cost in euros and the official ESTA Mobile app.
No visa needed for 90 days, but ESTA is required. The fee nearly doubled in 2025.
Same permit, written for French travellers rather than translated from English.
How to tell a real government site from a copy
This is the single most useful habit on the site, and it works for every country, not just the ones here.
- Read the end of the address, not the start
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A genuine portal ends in the country's government suffix exactly: .gov.vn for Vietnam, .gov.in for India, .gov.cn for China. Those suffixes are restricted and cannot be bought by a private company.
Anything that puts gov in the middle of the name, like vietnamvisa.govt.vn, is a business borrowing the look of one.
- The word official means nothing
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Resellers put it in the page title, the domain and the heading. It is not a protected term. Judge the address, never the wording.
- There is only ever one route
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A country either runs its own portal or appoints a single contractor. It never has several competing official sites. If three pages are selling you the same visa, at most one of them is real.
Brazil is the case that proves the rule: its official portal is brazil.vfsevisa.com, run by a contractor, so the government-suffix test alone would mislead you there. Indonesia does the same thing, running evisa.imigrasi.go.id itself while also appointing a contractor. A restricted suffix proves a site is official. Its absence proves nothing either way.
What changed recently
Entry rules move faster than the guides covering them. These are the changes that make older advice wrong.
Indonesia proposes raising the visa on arrival to IDR 750,000 online and IDR 1,000,000 at the airport. No start date is confirmed.
Egypt raises its e-visa by $5, to $30 single entry and $65 multiple entry.
The UK ETA rises from £16 to £20.
The US ESTA fee reaches $40.27, having been $21 until late 2025. Korea extends its K-ETA exemption for Americans to the end of 2026.
China extends its reduced visa fee of $140 for Americans, now running to 31 December 2026.
Thailand makes the Digital Arrival Card mandatory and retires the paper TM6. Immigration warns about sites charging for the free form the same day.
Brazil reinstates visas for Americans, Canadians and Australians after six years without.
New Zealand raises its visitor levy from NZ$35 to NZ$100, almost tripling the real cost of entry.
Kenya abolishes visas entirely and replaces them with an electronic travel authorisation costing $30.
How these pages are written
Worth stating plainly, because the subject attracts a lot of content that is neither current nor disinterested.
- Fees come from the issuing government, not from other guides. Where a figure is contested, the source is named on the page so you can check it yourself.
- Every page carries the date it was last checked. If that date is old, treat the page with suspicion. Entry rules change often.
- The official site is always linked first. We are not a visa agency and cannot process an application for you.
- Pages are written in each language, not translated. A Polish traveller and an American face different rules, so they get different pages rather than the same page in two voices.
Languages
More are being added. The permit you need depends on your passport, so the pages differ by more than wording.