My Vietnam evisa was off by a day

I don’t know how it happened, but I had applied for a Vietnam evisa from the official government website. On that page, there is a simple drop down box on when you’d like the visa to end. I already had my flights booked, so I checked when that flight was and that’s the day I picked in this drop down box.

That was my first mistake. I got cute and tried to pick the exact date, when what I should have done was just pick 30 days out from my date of entry. My second mistake was that I didn’t double check the PDF with the granted visa because while I had picked say 22/01/24, the granted visa was only to 21/01/24.

Thus when I went to pick up my ticket at the airport, the airline woulnd’t give me my ticket. They made me go to immigration to get a new stamped visa. The official then made me pay the equivalent of a $50 fine per person for overstaying our visa by a day. The lady then kept muttering something to me about a 5 year visa, which I had to tell her that wasn’t an option on the web site. She kept asking me why I went over my stay as well. At that part, I was so flustered and confused and just assumed I had made the mistake of picking the wrong date.

After we got through immigration, that’s when it dawned on me that it would be nearly impossible for me to have made the mistake. You see, I had to file for 3 visas all on separate days. We had a family member go with us and I filled theirs out months after I did mine and while you could say I picked the wrong day for them too since they were flying back with me, I had also filled out a visa for my mom who is staying later and her visa was off by a day as well. I told her to go get her visa corrected before her flight back. There is just no way for me to have picked an earlier day in all 3 times I filled out visas.

Lesson learned – when doing a Vietnam evisa, give yourself leeway on the begin and end dates. You don’t need to pick EXACT dates.

Lastly, if you’re doing a Vietnam evisa, I was worried about one picture I had taken of my wife near an open window (you know the face shadow,) they accepted the picture just fine. One visa app, my mom’s phone’s flash blocked out the passport number in the right hand corner and they took it just fine. Another visa picture of the passport actually left off the row of numbers at the bottom and they took it just fine too. So while they aren’t picky with the pictures, they somehow screw up the dates. And it’s impossible to get a hold of them; dp’s on Reddit said it was just faster to start a new visa.