Colombian passport holders need a visa to enter Vietnam, and the eVisa is the route almost all of them take. Here are the visa requirements for Colombian citizens in plain terms: the cost, the timing, and the details that matter when you fly out of Bogota with no direct service and no Vietnamese embassy at home.
Yes, you need a visa. Vietnam's 45-day exemption rests on two resolutions: Resolution 44/NQ-CP of 7 March 2025 covers 12 countries and Resolution 229/NQ-CP of 8 August 2025 adds 12 more, 24 in total. Colombia appears on neither, and no bilateral agreement waives the visa for ordinary Colombian passports.
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No minimum-stay threshold lets you skip it. A beach week, a wedding or a two-day meeting all need a visa before you board, and no airline at El Dorado will check you through without one.
That is what the eVisa is for. Since 15 August 2023, Resolution 127/NQ-CP has made it available to citizens of every country and territory, as the Embassy of Vietnam in the United States confirms. Up to 90 days, single or multiple entry, delivered as a PDF, and nothing in the scheme treats a Colombian applicant differently from anyone else.
December 2025 widened where it works. Resolution 389/NQ-CP, dated the 2nd, added 41 border gates and brought the running total to 83 checkpoints: 17 airports, 27 land border gates and 39 seaports. Long Thanh and Gia Binh appear before they are operational, so count on about 15 live airports. Whichever hub your Bogota itinerary funnels through, the Vietnamese airport at the end of it qualifies.
There is one narrow carve-out. Reach Phu Quoc island straight from another country by air or sea, hold a ticket out within 30 days, and stay on the island, and those 30 days need no visa. Cross to the mainland once and the carve-out disappears.
Colombian passport access keeps improving, which is exactly why people get caught out. Colombia climbed to 34th in the Henley Passport Index update of 16 March 2026, and trade with Vietnam reached 888.9 million USD in 2025, making Colombia Vietnam's fifth largest trading partner in Latin America. The visa rule has not moved with it. Companions on other passports can check our eligibility index by country.
No embassy trip, no visa-on-arrival queue. The first point carries unusual weight in Colombia, because Vietnam keeps no resident embassy in Bogota. Consular responsibility sits with the Vietnamese Embassy in Caracas, whose head of mission is ambassador to Venezuela and concurrently accredited to Colombia. A paper visa would mean posting your passport abroad or traveling for it.
We do not process visa-on-arrival letters. That route still needs a pre-approval letter, works at a handful of airports and never at a land or sea border. The eVisa covers all 83 checkpoints and is settled before you leave home.
Have these six things ready. Most stalled applications fail on the first two.
⚠️ Treat an emergency or temporary passport as unresolved rather than acceptable. Nowhere does the Vietnamese government or any of its embassies publish a position on whether such a document can carry an eVisa, and we are not going to invent one. File on the ordinary Colombian passport. If a temporary document is what you are holding, speak to us on +84 832 320 320 first, before any payment.
| Option | Validity | Our fee (per applicant) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Month Single Entry | 30 days from arrival | $54 |
| 1 Month Multiple Entry | 30 days from arrival | $84 |
| 3 Month Single Entry | 90 days from arrival | $94 |
| 3 Month Multiple Entry | 90 days from arrival | $104 |
All prices include the Vietnam Immigration Department's stamp fee, and here is the arithmetic. Vietnam charges $25 for a single-entry eVisa and $50 for a multiple-entry one, a rate set by Circular 28/2026/TT-BTC and unchanged since 1 April 2026. On a $54 single-entry order, $25 goes to Vietnam and $29 is our fee for preparing, checking, filing and following up the application.
You can skip us and apply yourself at evisa.gov.vn for the stamp fee alone. Some people should, and with three weeks in hand and a straightforward passport that is the cheaper path. What you pay us for is the review, the correction and a human answering when something goes wrong. Our full fee breakdown lists every add-on. The stamp fee is not refunded if the application is refused.
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Three speeds, all priced per applicant:
The count does not begin at checkout. It begins when your file reaches Vietnam Immigration, normally inside 2 business hours of the payment going through. Three working days is the statutory standard on the Vietnamese side, 3 to 5 is what happens in practice, and Vietnamese public holidays push it out, with Tet closing the offices for several days at a stretch.
That schedule is Vietnam Immigration's, not ours. Filing fast, chasing and correcting are ours; approval is not. File one to two weeks ahead and the choice of speed stops mattering. Remember the Colombian half of the calendar too: a Monday puente holds up a passport renewal at home as effectively as Tet holds up a decision in Hanoi. Inside 24 hours of departure, call the hotline before paying so we can confirm capacity.
Let the itinerary decide this, not the product name. Land once, leave once, and single entry carries the whole trip.
Multiple entry earns its price the moment your route leaves Vietnam and comes back. Almost nobody flies 25 hours from Colombia for one country, and an itinerary out of Bogota usually collects Cambodia, Laos or Thailand on the way. Fly Hanoi to Siem Reap and return into Ho Chi Minh City on a single-entry visa and the visa is spent the moment you cross out. The upgrade costs $30 on a one-month visa, $10 on a three-month one. When in doubt, choose multiple entry.
The fastest looking routings out of Bogota go north through Miami, Atlanta or New York, and for Colombian travelers that is a trap, not a shortcut. Colombia is not in the US Visa Waiver Program, so ESTA is not available, and a transit (C) visa is required for travel through the United States on the way to another country. Changing planes without leaving the terminal still counts, and interview waits in Bogota run far longer than any Vietnamese visa takes.
⚠️ A Vietnamese eVisa says nothing about your right to transit a third country. It authorizes entry to Vietnam and nothing else. Check the transit rules for every country your itinerary touches, including the return leg, before you buy the ticket. Airline staff in Bogota are the ones who apply those rules, at the check-in desk.
The photograph is the one upload the government form says almost nothing about: straight on, no glasses, and that is the whole instruction. It is also a routine reason applications stall. These five points clear it:
A phone photo against a white wall in daylight works. A cropped holiday snap will not.
Two airports take almost every arrival from Colombia, and the route map decides it, not the rules. Tan Son Nhat in Ho Chi Minh City (SGN) and Noi Bai in Hanoi (HAN) are the only Vietnamese airports with nonstop service from the hubs Bogota connects to, so one of them is where your last long flight lands.
Da Nang (DAD) is on the eVisa list and is the gateway to Hoi An and Hue, but from Colombia it needs a third flight. Phu Quoc (PQC) is an eVisa checkpoint in its own right, normally reached on a domestic hop. Land and sea gates count too: 27 land crossings, so returning overland from Cambodia or Laos is fine, and 39 seaports for cruise arrivals. The port-of-entry field has been dropped from the issued eVisa, so you are not locked to the checkpoint you nominated.
One more thing gets filed before you fly. Vietnam's Immigration Department runs a Pre-Arrival Information system at prearrival.immigration.gov.vn, live at Tan Son Nhat since 15 April 2026, at Phu Quoc since 1 June and at Noi Bai and Da Nang since 15 June 2026. Passport, flight and accommodation details go in no earlier than three days before you land, and a QR code comes back. Treat it as required at those airports. It is a declaration, and it stands in for nothing.
Overstaying became substantially more expensive on 15 December 2025, when Decree 282/2025 came into force in place of Decree 144/2021. The maximum penalty moved from VND 20 million to VND 40 million, around 1,520 USD, twice what it had been.
Beneath the ceiling, the penalty is banded by length. Fewer than 16 days sits at VND 500,000 to 2 million, roughly 19 to 76 USD; 16 to 30 days moves up to VND 5 to 10 million, roughly 190 to 380 USD. Read those dollar figures as December 2025 conversions.
Money is the lesser consequence. An overstay also exposes you to deportation and to a bar on returning, and the UK Foreign Office records that Vietnamese authorities can prevent you leaving until the fine is settled. On a 30-hour routing home to Bogota, a missed departure is not a flight you rebook casually.
⚠️ Issue date sets your exit date; arrival does not. The validity window printed on the PDF is calculated from the entry date you supplied on the form, so turning up three days late costs you three days. Read your deadline off the printed exit date, not off the stamp you collect at the border.
No, and that is the main reason the eVisa suits travelers from Colombia. Vietnam keeps no resident embassy in Bogota. The Vietnamese Embassy in Caracas covers Colombia concurrently, and in 2023 Colombia's president urged Vietnam to open a mission in the country. Until that changes, online is the route.
No. Vietnam does not recognize third-country visas for entry, so a US visa gives you no rights at a Vietnamese border. You need a Vietnamese visa or an exemption, and Colombia has neither. Your US visa is worth having for a different reason: it is what lets you connect through a US airport.
Around 130, mostly across Latin America, the Schengen area and parts of Asia, which put Colombia 34th in the Henley Passport Index update of March 2026. Vietnam is not among them. Neighboring Chile is treated quite differently, with a 90-day exemption under a bilateral agreement, so a mixed group should check the Chilean eligibility page.
Strictly, no. Phu Quoc gives 30 visa-free days to arrivals that come straight from abroad by air or sea and stay on the island. No airport in the Americas serves it, so the Colombian route is an airside connection in Ho Chi Minh City onto a domestic sector, which still counts as direct. Nearly everyone applies regardless, since one night on the mainland ends the waiver.
Not through us. We stopped processing visa-on-arrival letters, and that route still needs a pre-approval document before you fly, so it saves nothing. It works at a handful of airports only, never at land borders or seaports, and it ends in a counter queue after 30 hours in transit.
Budget a day and a half for the journey. There is no nonstop service between Colombia and Vietnam, and none from Bogota to anywhere in Asia. What El Dorado has is long-haul nonstops that put Vietnam one connection away: Paris at about 10 hours 15 minutes, Madrid at 9 hours 45, Istanbul at 13 hours 25 and Doha at 16 hours 35. Paris, Istanbul and Doha run nonstop into Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, roughly 11 to 12 more hours in the air, so those are the two-flight options. Madrid means a third leg. Door to door, plan on 26 to 32 hours.
Vietnam is exactly 12 hours ahead, all year. Colombia's legal time is UTC minus 5, held by the Instituto Nacional de Metrologia, with no daylight saving, and Vietnam sits at UTC plus 7 and does not change its clocks either, so the gap never moves. Our support hours of 08:00 to 21:00 in Vietnam are 20:00 the previous evening to 09:00 the same morning in Bogota, so write over your evening and the reply is usually waiting at breakfast. Our guide to time in Vietnam has the detail.
Plan around the Colombian calendar too. Colombia has one of the world's longest holiday lists, and Ley 51 de 1983, the Ley Emiliani, moves ten of those dates to the following Monday whenever they fall midweek, which is why so much of the year arrives as a puente. One more joined this year: the Ministry of the Interior confirmed that Ley 2578 de 2026 makes 9 July a national holiday, observed on Monday 13 July in 2026. Semana Santa, the mid-year school break and mid-December into January are the busiest outbound weeks.
Payment is in US dollars. Your bank converts from Colombian pesos at its own rate, so expect a small gap between the price on screen and the line on your statement. In Vietnam you will be spending dong, and card acceptance is good in the big cities and thin outside them.
Help on the ground comes from your own embassy. Colombia keeps a resident embassy in Hanoi, the mission to call for a lost passport or a consular emergency. Before you go, our Vietnam visa guide and our answers to common visa questions cover the rest.