The Vietnam e-visa from Pakistan, and the border gate rule

After Russia and Türkiye, Vietnam comes as a relief.

Vietnam runs a National Electronic Visa system through the Immigration Department of its Ministry of Public Security, and it is open to Pakistani passport holders. You apply online, you pay online, and the decision comes back electronically. There is no interview and no service centre queue.

There is one rule inside it that matters more than anything else, and it has nothing to do with whether you are approved.

You may only enter through a designated border gate

Vietnam's official e-visa portal states that foreigners using an e-visa must enter and exit through international border gates designated by the Government, and it publishes the list of them.

An e-visa is not a general permission to enter Vietnam anywhere. It is a permission to enter at named places.

For a group flying into a major international airport this is invisible, because those airports are on the list. It becomes a real problem in exactly one situation: an itinerary that crosses into Vietnam by land or by river from a neighbouring country at a crossing that is not designated. A valid e-visa and the wrong gate is still a refused entry.

If you are ever combining Vietnam with Cambodia, Laos or China on your own after a group trip, that is the sentence to remember.

Single entry and multiple entry are different documents

The portal issues both, at different fees, and the difference is not academic.

If your plan leaves Vietnam and comes back, for instance a side trip to another country in the region, a single entry e-visa is spent the moment you exit. The second entry is refused. That has to be decided at application time, not at the airport on the day.

An e-visa also has a maximum validity, so it is not a document you obtain casually far in advance and use whenever. It is timed to the trip.

What a refusal costs

The e-visa fee is paid at application, through the portal's own payment gateway, in US dollars rather than in rupees or dong. If the application is refused, that fee is gone.

It is a much smaller amount than the visa fees on our harder destinations, which is part of why Vietnam feels straightforward, but it is still money paid before a decision rather than after.

We do not print the current figures here. They are set by the portal and revised over time, and a number typed into an article cannot tell you when it went out of date. The amounts we hold, the date we read them and the source are on the Vietnam page in the visa section.

The one that catches people on a multi country trip

Our four country Asia tour crosses Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam in one journey. Each of those countries has its own entry arrangement, and holding one does nothing for the others.

If you are looking at a trip that crosses several borders, the question to ask is not "is the visa easy" but "how many visas is this, and which of them are inside what I am paying you". Ask that before you book, of anyone, including us. It is the question that separates a package that has been thought through from one that has been assembled.

What we do

We prepare and file the e-visa, we make sure the entry point on the application matches the flights, and we tell you before you book whether an itinerary needs single or multiple entry.

The border gate rule is the reason we would rather file it ourselves than have you do it and hope the details line up. It is not a difficult visa. It is a visa with one detail that is unforgiving if it is wrong.

The trip is on the Vietnam page, with the departure, the days and what the price carries. The wider position on visas and refusals is on our visa support page.