What you need to get in, and when to apply
One table for every country on this site, then the four things travellers confuse, the arrival cards that are free and the sites that charge for them, and the five rule changes that carry a date.
The position, country by country
Everything below was checked on 8 September 2026 against government sources, and entry rules move faster than any other number on this site. Treat the table as the shape of the problem rather than as a guarantee: the fee and the day count get confirmed again when your dates are fixed, and again a fortnight before you fly.
The four passports covered are the United States, the United Kingdom, European Union member states and Australia. Where those four diverge — and they do, in Vietnam, in India, in Taiwan — the row says so.
| Country | What you need | Cost | How long it takes | What changes soon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vietnam | E-visa, up to 90 days, single or multiple entry. UK, French, German, Italian and Spanish passports also hold a 45-day unilateral exemption and can skip it. US and Australian passports cannot. | USD 25 single entry, USD 50 multiple | Normally three working days. Apply two to three weeks out | Nothing announced |
| Thailand | Visa exemption, plus the TDAC digital arrival card for every non-Thai national | Exemption free. TDAC free. A tourist visa, for stays past the exemption, runs about THB 1,000 | The TDAC takes three to five minutes and is filed within 72 hours of arrival | The exemption falls from 60 days to 30 on 15 September 2026. One 30-day extension at immigration costs THB 1,900 |
| Cambodia | E-visa or visa on arrival, plus a compulsory e-arrival card for air arrivals. Land and river crossings still use paper forms | E-visa USD 36. The e-arrival card is free | E-visa three to four business days, lodgeable 60 days ahead. Arrival card up to seven days ahead | Nothing announced. The Angkor pass is separate: USD 37, 62 and 72 for one, three and seven days |
| Laos | E-visa or visa on arrival, up to 30 days | USD 50 | Four to five working days. Non-refundable even if refused | E-visas are now accepted at the Boten land crossing from China |
| Japan | Nothing. A 90-day visa waiver, unchanged | Free | No application exists | JESTA is not live. The target is fiscal year 2028. Do not register for anything |
| South Korea | Visa-free entry, up to 90 days for most Western passports, with K-ETA waived for 67 countries | Free | No application while the waiver holds | The K-ETA waiver runs only to 31 December 2026. Any 2027 departure must be re-checked |
| Taiwan | Visa-exempt entry, 90 days. Passport valid six months or more, and proof of onward travel | Free | No application | Non-extendable for most, but UK and Canadian passports may apply to extend to 180 days |
| India | e-Tourist visa. Thirty-day, one-year and five-year versions | USD 10 for arrivals April to June, USD 25 July to March, USD 40 for the one-year, plus a 3% bank charge. UK nationals pay a higher reciprocal fee | The window opens 120 days out, the minimum is four days before arrival, and most issue in about 72 hours | Nothing announced. Confirm the UK and five-year figures on the official fee calculator, which is the only place they are reliable |
| Nepal | Visa on arrival, priced by duration | USD 30 for 15 days, USD 50 for 30, USD 125 for 90 with multiple entry | At the counter. Carry USD cash | A licensed guide has been compulsory for trekking since September 2023, and checkpoint enforcement tightened through 2026 |
| Bhutan | A visa arranged through a licensed Bhutanese operator, plus the Sustainable Development Fee | SDF USD 100 per adult per night. USD 50 for ages 6 to 11, free under 6 | Handled inside the booking. There is no independent route in | The halved USD 100 rate is confirmed to 31 August 2027. The base rate behind it is USD 200 |
| Sri Lanka | ETA, 30 days, double entry. Free, but you still have to apply and be approved | Free | Online, before travel | Free since 25 May 2026, for 40 nationalities including all four of ours. This was a decision, not a permanent law |
| Indonesia | Paid e-VOA. None of our four markets is on the visa-free list | IDR 500,000 for 30 days, and another IDR 500,000 for the single 30-day extension that takes you to 60 | Online before you fly, or at the counter on landing | Bali's tourist levy of IDR 150,000 per person is separate, one-off and cashless only |
| Malaysia | Visa-free short stay, plus the MDAC digital arrival card on the immigration department's own portal | Visa-free | Filed before arrival | The official page did not state a fee when we checked, so we print none. File it on the government domain and nowhere else |
| Singapore | Visa-free short stay, plus the compulsory SG Arrival Card | Free. Immigration says plainly that any site charging for it is not affiliated with them | Within three days of arrival, counting the day you land | Nothing announced |
| Philippines | Visa-free, commonly 30 days, plus compulsory eTravel registration | Free, confirmed by the Bureau of Immigration | Before you fly. The official site states the current window | Nothing announced |
| Uzbekistan | 30 days visa-free | Free | No application | Nothing announced |
| Kyrgyzstan | 30 days visa-free | Free | No application | Nothing announced |
| Georgia | Visa-free, and unusually long: a US passport is admitted for 365 days | Free | No application | Nothing announced. Check your own passport against the current list, which is not identical for all four markets |
| Armenia | Visa-free or e-visa, depending on the passport | Given by nationality on the foreign ministry checker | Three days or so where an e-visa applies | We print no figure here. The official checker answers by passport and that is the only answer worth having |
| Jordan | Visa on arrival, or an e-visa. The Jordan Pass carries the visa fee inside it | Jordan Pass 70, 75 or 80 JOD by the number of Petra days. Petra alone is 50, 55 or 60 JOD for one, two or three days at the accommodated rate | Bought online before you fly. Valid three months from entry | The pass waives the visa fee only if you stay three nights or more. Buy it before arrival or it does not apply |
| Oman | 14 days visa-free for most Western passports. Longer needs the e-visa | Free to 14 days | Immediate at 14 days or under | Nothing announced. Our ten-day Oman journey sits inside the free window; a Jordan and Oman voyage does not always |
| United Arab Emirates | Visa on arrival for most Western passports, and relevant here mainly as a transit point | Varies | At the counter | The eligible list and the day count both change. Check the official checker the week you fly, and do not accept a number from anyone else |
Myanmar. The US, UK and Australia all advise against travel and most Western consumer insurance is void there. We do not sell Myanmar, so we do not publish its entry rules as though we might.
China. Two schemes are constantly confused: a 240-hour transit-only waiver that requires an onward ticket to a third country, and a 30-day unilateral waiver whose confirmed list is European-led. US, UK and Australian passports are not confirmed on the 30-day list. We do not run China journeys, and the honest answer for anyone adding one is that the position is fluid and must be checked at the time.
Four things that get confused, and the difference matters
Most of the trouble we see is vocabulary rather than paperwork. Four different objects go by the same name in conversation, and only one of them can actually stop you at a desk.
A visa
A permission issued in advance by the country you are entering, on paper in your passport or in a database against its number. It costs money, it takes days, and a refusal is a refusal. India, Laos and Cambodia work this way for our four markets.
A visa waiver
An agreement that your passport does not need a visa at all. Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Georgia sit here, and so does Thailand — which is exactly why the September change matters. A waiver has a day count attached, and the day count is the thing that gets cut.
An e-visa
A visa with a web form in front of it. Still a visa, still refusable, still on a clock. Vietnam takes about three working days, Laos four to five, Cambodia three to four business days. The clock is the reason we ask for passport details early rather than politely.
An arrival card
Not a visa and not a permission. A declaration — who you are, where you are staying, which flight — that replaces the paper form the cabin crew used to hand out. Thailand, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines all run one. They are quick, they are compulsory where they exist, and the honest ones cost nothing.
The arrival cards are free. The sites charging for them are not the government
This is the most useful paragraph on the page, so it gets named plainly rather than hinted at.
- Singapore's SG Arrival Card is free. The Immigration and Checkpoints Authority states outright that any third-party site charging a fee for it is not affiliated with them. File it within three days of arrival, counting the day you land.
- The Philippines' eTravel registration is free. The Bureau of Immigration has published that in as many words, on its own site, because enough travellers were being charged.
- Cambodia's e-arrival card is free. Applying for the e-visa through the same portal carries a separate USD 6 service charge, which is where the confusion starts. The card itself costs nothing, and holding an approved e-visa does not excuse you from filing it.
- Thailand's TDAC is free. Copycat sites charge between USD 10 and USD 90 or more for a form that takes three to five minutes on the official immigration domain.
- Malaysia's MDAC is filed on the immigration department's own portal. We could not confirm a fee on the official page, so we quote none — but the rule holds regardless: file it on the government site, and treat a third-party charge as a fee for retyping your own details.
None of these sites is illegal, exactly. They take a government form, put a shopping cart in front of it, and charge you for the privilege of not reading the URL. The tell is always the domain. A government arrival card lives on a government domain, and if the page wants a card number before it wants your flight number, close it.
The same logic runs one level up, into visas proper. Vietnam charges USD 25 for a single-entry e-visa. Booked through an intermediary with service fee and tax on top, the same visa commonly costs around USD 55, and the multiple-entry version around USD 80 against a government fee of USD 50. You are not buying speed. You are buying somebody else typing.
The five changes that carry a date
Rules without a date attached are rumour. These five have one, and between them they rearrange more itineraries this year than anything else on the site.
| The change | Date | What it does to a plan |
|---|---|---|
| Thailand cuts its visa exemption from 60 days to 30 | 15 September 2026 | For US, UK, EU and Australian passports. Anything longer needs a visa rather than an extension request at the airport. Almost every journey we sell sits well inside 30 days, so for most readers this changes nothing — but a long, slow Southeast Asia trip that treated Thailand as its base needs rebuilding. See multi-country routing for what that looks like in practice |
| South Korea's K-ETA waiver expires | 31 December 2026 | The waiver covers 67 countries and runs to the end of this year. A 2027 departure may need a K-ETA again. Nobody should be told the waiver is permanent, and any operator writing that has not looked since last year |
| Sri Lanka's ETA became free | 25 May 2026 | Free for 40 nationalities, ours included: 30 days, double entry. Free is not the same as visa-free — you still apply online and wait for approval. The double entry is what makes a Sri Lanka and south India route work without a second fee |
| Bhutan's Sustainable Development Fee holds at USD 100 a night | Confirmed to 31 August 2027 | Half the USD 200 headline rate, per adult per night, for the whole stay including trekking days. Children 6 to 11 pay USD 50 and under-6s nothing. A nine-day Bhutan journey carries eight nights of it before a room is booked, which is most of why Bhutan sits in the top price tier |
| Japan's JESTA is not live | Not expected before fiscal year 2028 | A vendor was selected in April 2026 with roughly 17 months of build and 8 months of testing still ahead, and the timeline has already slipped more than once. There is nothing to register for today. If a site tells you to buy a Japanese travel authorisation, it is selling you air |
Passports, blank pages and the onward ticket
Three things refuse people at check-in far more often than visas do, and all three are checkable at your kitchen table a month out.
Six months of validity
Jordan, Oman, the UAE and Taiwan all want a passport valid at least six months beyond entry, and the requirement is common enough across the region that we apply it as a blanket rule. Count from the last day of your trip, not the first. A passport that expires in May is not a six-month passport for a trip that ends in December.
Blank pages
E-visas print nothing into a passport, which lulls people. The entry and exit stamps still need somewhere to go, and a four-country voyage collects eight of them. Open your passport and look before you assume there is room; the answer is a renewal, and renewals take weeks you may not have.
Proof of onward travel
Taiwan asks for it as a condition of visa-exempt entry. Oman asks for return travel, a hotel booking, insurance and evidence of funds on the e-visa route. China's 240-hour transit waiver requires an onward ticket to a third country, not a ticket home. Airlines enforce this at the gate more consistently than immigration does at the desk, because the airline is the one that has to fly you back.
None of this is exotic. It is simply the part of the process that happens before anyone looks at a visa, and the part that a check three weeks out makes impossible to get wrong.
Leaving a country and coming back into it
Multi-country routes break on re-entry more often than on entry, and the fee is not usually the problem. The permission is.
Vietnam is the clearest case. The e-visa is USD 25 single entry and USD 50 multiple, and a voyage that runs Hanoi to Laos and back into Ho Chi Minh City needs the multiple. Twenty-five dollars is nothing; discovering at Luang Prabang airport that you hold the wrong one is a rebooked flight. Our 22-day Indochina route is built so that each country is entered once, which is a routing decision as much as a paperwork one.
Sri Lanka's free ETA is issued as double entry for 30 days, which is what allows a Colombo, south India, Colombo shape without a second application. Indonesia works the other way: the e-VOA buys 30 days and one 30-day extension, and leaving the country ends it. Fly Bali to Singapore for two nights and come back, and you buy a second IDR 500,000 e-VOA for the privilege.
Thailand adds a wrinkle specific to land borders. Under the framework starting 15 September 2026, entries on the exemption at a land crossing are generally capped at two per calendar year. It is close to academic for our clients — the Thai legs we run arrive by air — but it matters to anyone planning a Southeast Asia loop that hops in and out overland, and it is one more reason we build those loops around flights.
What we do about visas, and what we do not
We tell you what each country on your route requires, what it costs, and the week you should apply. That goes into your documents as a checklist with dates on it, and we chase it if the date passes. Bhutan is the exception in the other direction: its visa is issued against a booking with a licensed operator, so that one genuinely is ours to arrange, and it is arranged.
Everywhere else, you apply. We do not lodge visa applications on your behalf. It requires handing your passport data to a third party, it adds a failure point between you and a government, and it makes us responsible for a decision we do not control.
Nor do we route clients through the agencies that put a service fee on top of a government form. A Vietnamese e-visa at roughly USD 55 instead of USD 25, or a free arrival card at USD 40, is money moving for no reason. If a supplier of ours ever quietly adds one, tell us; that is a supplier we stop using.
The one thing we ask in return is early passport details. Almost every failure we have seen in this area is a timing failure rather than a rules failure — an Indian e-visa lodged three days before a flight when the minimum is four, a passport six weeks from expiry that nobody looked at, a K-ETA question asked in January 2027 that should have been asked in October.
Tell us the passports and we will tell you the paperwork
Send the countries, the month and which passports are travelling. You get the entry position for that exact route, with the dates you need to act on.
Questions travellers ask most
Do I need a visa for Thailand after 15 September 2026?
Not for a normal holiday. US, UK, EU and Australian passports keep visa-exempt entry; the exemption simply falls from 60 days to 30 on 15 September 2026. Every Thai journey we sell sits comfortably inside 30 days.
You still file the TDAC digital arrival card, within 72 hours of arrival, on the official immigration site. It is free and takes about five minutes. If you genuinely need more than 30 days, that is now a tourist visa rather than an exemption, and it is applied for before you travel.
Is the Sri Lankan ETA really free, or is that a discount?
It is free, for 40 nationalities including US, UK, EU and Australian passports, since 25 May 2026. Thirty days, double entry.
Free is not the same as visa-free. You still apply online and wait for approval before you fly. And it is worth remembering how volatile this particular fee has been: it was USD 50, briefly doubled to USD 100 in April 2024, then reversed within weeks. We would not assume free is permanent.
Should I register for JESTA before travelling to Japan?
No. There is nothing to register for. Japan has no such scheme in force: its electronic travel authorisation is not live, and the government target is fiscal year 2028, with a vendor selected only in April 2026 and design, build and testing still ahead.
A 90-day visa waiver is all a US, UK, EU or Australian passport needs today. Any site selling you a Japanese travel authorisation right now is selling nothing.
Why will you not just apply for our visas for us?
Because it means passing your passport data to an intermediary, and because it puts us between you and a government decision we cannot influence. If an application is refused, you want to be the person who can call the consulate.
What we do instead is give you the exact requirement for your route, the cost, and the week to apply, then chase you if that week goes by. Bhutan is the one exception: its visa is issued against the booking itself, so we arrange it.
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