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I was doing a bit of reading up on how to get a visa on arrival for Vietnam, and several sources mention that I need to get an "Approval Letter" to pick up my visa at the airport.

What is an "Approval Letter", and how do I get one?

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A VOA for Vietnam requires that your visa request be pre-approved by the government before you travel. The "Approval Letter" is the document the government will issue once it has approved your request for a visa.

To get a VOA it is easiest to ask the tour company you are traveling with to organize the VOA on your behalf. There are also some agencies in Vietnam that will organize VOAs for any independent traveler for a fee. If you are going the visa agency route, you might do well to do a bit of research on travel forums like TripAdvisor, Thorn Tree, etc for recommended companies, as there are dodgy ones out there as well.

The process is pretty straight forward, you supply the usual personal factoids (dob, full name, passport number, citizenship, etc), pay the agency their handling fee & they apply on your behalf, you then print out the Authorization Letter they send you, find the VOA office/line upon arrival, hang around for a while as the officials take their darn sweet time processing you and then go be the last person to claim their luggage and start your adventure.

Depending on the tour company, some can arrange for your guide to meet you inside immigration and help speed up the process, but most leave on your own to handle the VOA process at the airport.

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  • That does rather sound like it's designed to make the "on arrival" part a mockery. If they want to pre-approve travelers, they can do that, of course -- but why pretend it's a visa on arrival, then?
    – hmakholm left over Monica
    Apr 10, 2017 at 14:00
  • How is it not a VOA? You get the visa itself on arrival.
    – user13044
    Apr 10, 2017 at 14:14
  • It sounds to me that effectively the approval letter is what would be called a visa in most other countries. If you have to be pre-approved for travel before you leave, the document that shows that approval is a "visa", and what is put into your passport on arrival is just an entry stamp. Calling the entry stamp a "visa" just so you can claim that you have visas-on-arrival seems disingenuous to me/
    – hmakholm left over Monica
    Apr 10, 2017 at 14:16
  • A number of countries with pre-approved visas stamp a visa AND an entry stamp into your passport. But ultimately a country can call it whatever it prefers and the fact that your naming concept is different is immaterial.
    – user13044
    Apr 10, 2017 at 14:27

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