What is a e-Tourist Visa/ETA?
Simply put, it is an electronic authorisation to travel to India for touristical purposes only. It is issued for a month with 2 entries or for one or five years with multiple entries for visits with a duration of stay up to 90 days from date of entry, or 180 if you are from the US, Canada, UK or Japan. You apply for the e-Visa online and receive it on your email a day or two later. You must apply minimum 4 days before the trip but with a maximum of 120 days of anticipation.
Do you need one for India?
If you are a citizen of Bhutan, Nepal, Maldives or India only the passport is needed. If you are a national from another country you need a Visa. The fastest way is applying for a e-Tourist Visa in advance.
Where do you apply for an e-Tourist Visa safe and scam free?
If you search on google for pages where you can apply for the Indian e-Tourist Visa you will be surprised how many you can find. They give you different information about the kind of e-visas and the fees are different too. If your instinct would be to go for the cheapest one, we advise you to not do that. Why? Because many pages are just fake and scams. It is pretty likely that you would pay for something that doesn’t even exist. And your vacation will be ruined just for wanting to save some money. Others say they help you with the process and the fee is more expensive than doing it by yourself. About those, we do not know if you actually get the e-Tourist Visa, but what we saw in some is that their formulars are actually the same or almost the same as the official. The safest way is applying for the e-Visa on the official page of the government of India. We are sure about it because we called at the embassy to confirm that this information is correct. The price there is 40 USD plus 1.39 USD payment tax.
You need a valid passport
Before you start your application for the Indian e-Tourist Visa you have to check your passport. It has to have a minimum validity of 6 months and two free pages. In the case that you renew your passport before your trip but your e-Tourist Visa appication has the old passport details, make sure you carry both of them with you. The immigration has no problem with it. However, your new passport has to have the same name and nationality as the old one, otherwise you might be declined to enter the India.
Concerns about some application points
While you go through the application form you will have to fill some details as "port of arrival", "expected port of exit", "the reference of the place you stay".
If you have your holidays already booked and your return flight ticket, filling these details shouldn’t take you more than 2 minutes. But if you go like us, on a long, undefined trip, backpacking with spontaneous decisions of the place of staying, we might save you some time: If you want to apply for the e-Tourist Visa without having your flight ticket first, then you should have an idea of your port of arrival. Keep in mind that you have to enter India for the first time from the port you specified in the application form.
The exit point is not that important. It is actually an optional field. You can put one and change your mind on the fly without any problem. You don't need to update it nor anything, just continue your trip relaxed.
You haven’t booked any place where to stay during your trip? You should consider looking for one. In the application form you have to put your reference address. We didn’t have one at that moment, so we just booked one near the aiport and done. To be sure about it, we called the embassy to ask about it. The answer was that you can put one where you think you might stay or a temporal one. If you end up having a different address is not a problem.
Tips from our experience
- Take some passport pictures with you. You never know when they might ask you for one.
- Make copies of your e-Tourist Visa authorisation, passport and keep one of each always with you.
- Have always a pen handy. At the immigration desk they will ask you to fill a paper but not give you a pen.
- The official page where you apply for the e-Tourist Visa fails sometimes. It gives you an error and you have to resume by using a code that they send you to your email. Whenever you resume and it says "data base in maintenance" or something similar you just have to refresh the page few times and it works again. We took a while to finish our applications. Get some snacks when you start doing yours.
- The e-Tourist Visa conditions say that the tourists must have a return ticket when entering India. However, nobody asked us to show one. Because we wanted a spontaneous decision of where to travel next, we didn’t book anything in advance. As a backup plan we considered booking one on the spot if we needed to show a ticket. There are some companies like KLM that allows you to reserve tickets and pay within 24h by bank transfer. If in 24h you don’t pay, your ticket is cancelled but at the moment of reservation you receive your flight confirmation. However, even if they do not always ask for it, the rules were confirmed to us from the embassy of India.