Twenty-five countries run more than one official entry portal

The question this registry exists to answer sounds simple. Which website is the real one?

For most of the countries we track there is one answer. One government portal, one address, one record. For twenty-five of them there is more than one, and every one of those portals is genuine.

Two countries run three systems

New Zealand operates an eVisa at immigration.govt.nz, a separate electronic travel authorisation at nzeta.immigration.govt.nz, and a traveller declaration at travellerdeclaration.govt.nz. Three addresses, three systems, three different groups of people who need them.

South Korea does the same. K-ETA at k-eta.go.kr for visa-exempt visitors, an electronic arrival card at e-arrivalcard.go.kr, and a visa portal at visa.go.kr.

Twenty-three more countries run two.

Why this happens

Systems accumulate rather than replace.

A country builds an eVisa portal. Years later it adds an electronic travel authorisation for visitors who do not need a visa, because that is a different legal instrument serving a different group. Later still it retires the paper arrival card and puts a digital one in its place. None of those three replaces the one before it. Each serves a different traveller, or the same traveller at a different stage of the journey.

They also tend to be built by different parts of government. An immigration department owns the visa. A border agency owns the arrival card. A tourism ministry sometimes owns a levy. Each procures its own system, and each gets its own domain.

The registry shows the pattern plainly. Of the twenty-five:

• Fourteen pair an eVisa with a digital arrival card. India, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Laos, Cuba, Ecuador, Antigua and Barbuda, Papua New Guinea, Suriname and Tanzania.
• Four pair an eVisa with an eTA. Australia, Israel, South Africa, St Kitts and Nevis.
• Three are split by geography rather than by function.
• Two pair a visa portal with something else entirely. Egypt runs an eVisa and a separate digital visa on arrival. Indonesia runs an eVisa alongside a tourist levy voucher.

The geographic splits are the least expected

Iraq runs two eVisa portals. One for travel through Baghdad at eservice.evisa.iq, and one for the Kurdistan Region at visit.gov.krd. Which one applies depends on where a traveller enters.

The United Arab Emirates runs separate systems for Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

China runs a national arrival card registration alongside a Shanghai-specific eVisa portal.

In each case both addresses are official. Neither is a fake, and neither is wrong. They simply cover different territory inside the same country.

What this means in practice

For a traveller, searching for a country's visa portal returns several results that are all real, plus the lookalike sites that cluster around them. Picking the wrong real one wastes an afternoon. Picking a lookalike costs money.

For anyone building a booking flow or an assistant, it means "the official portal for country X" is not one value. It is a set, and each item in the set is correct for a different case. A system that stores one URL per country is storing the wrong shape of data for twenty-five countries, and it will hand a user the arrival card when they needed the visa.

That is why our records hold every official address we have found for a country, each labelled with what it is, rather than collapsing them into a single link. It is less tidy. It is also the only version that survives contact with how governments actually build these things.

The direction of travel

Nothing in the change log suggests this consolidates. Over the last ten months the movement has been the other way: countries adding systems to systems they already run. Egypt's digital visa on arrival launched alongside its eVisa rather than replacing it. Thailand put a companion app into pilot beside an arrival card it had just made compulsory.

The useful question is shifting. For a decade it was how many countries have gone digital. Increasingly it is how many systems a traveller has to clear before they land.

Every portal named here is recorded in the EntryCheck registry with the date a person last confirmed it. Country pages carry the full list for each country.