Sri Lanka travel: ETA, Visa, Return ticket

For those, who want to travel to Sri Lanka, there are a few evergreen questions related to entry requirements: ETA, visa and whether a return flight ticket is required. To make things worse, there is a lot of contradictory information about these online. Here is my personal experience.

ETA, or Electronic Travel Authorisation

With the exception of citizens of only one or two countries, all nationalities will need to get an ETA before they arrive in Sri Lanka. This is a very straightforward job, you can do everything online. Be careful though, there are some fake sites that will try to convince you into providing them your credit card details, and they are not going to sell you anything. The only place where you can arrange the ETA is a Sri Lankan government website, this one: http://www.eta.gov.lk/slvisa/.

You will find all the necessary information on the website, so I’m not going to go into details about it here (fill in the form, pay the fee with a debit card or credit card, and you will get the ETA letter in an email to the address that you provided). One important thing is that you must pay a fee. There are some special “discount” periods when some nationalities (e.g. European Union) can get the ETA free of charge, but you will see that on the website, too. When I got mine, I, as an EU citizen, didn’t have to pay, and I received the ETA in an email in just a few minutes.

Is the ETA a visa?

No. But for most people, all you need to enter the country is the ETA. It is advisable to print it out and have it ready when you arrive. I had it ready in a hard copy, but no-one asked me for it – but better be safe than sorry. You get an immigration card on the plane, which you need to fill in. At arrival, queue at the Immigration desk, and they stamp you into the country – that’s all. In my case, no questions were asked at all.

Officially, however, there are strict rules to enter Sri Lanka. The requirements include the ETA, proof that you will have enough money to cover your entire stay (maybe a printout of your current bank statement?), and a return or onward ticket out of Sri Lanka. But let me repeat: no-one, including the immigration officer, ever asked me a single question, the entire communication between us was “Good evening – Good evening”. Some people say that they may perhaps ask questions if you look like a very poor person trying to find some odd jobs or beg on the streets of Colombo – but I cannot comment on that. Don’t dress like a beggar, when you arrive in a new country and when you meet the immigration officer – that’s all the advice I can give you here.

But what about the airlines?

All this sounds good, but then online forums are full of opinions/beliefs/advice, that the airlines will not let you board the plane without a return ticket. These opinions made me worried, really, because I had no idea how much time I wanted to spend in Sri Lanka. Initially, you get 30 days without a visa (with the ETA), but you can extend it several times, should you want to stay longer than that. And because I really didn’t know what to expect, I just didn’t want to, and was unable to, decide when I will want to leave the country. (Unfortunately, it turned out that I wanted to leave the country too soon – you can read about it here.) And buying a throw-away ticket for a hundred euros is not fun.

No, I have never tried those tricky/smart services that sell you some fake ticket for a few dollars, which you can show at check-in, but which you cannot actually use. This is a point these service providers will acknowledge in their FAQs, if they have one. And I am not comfortable with using fake tickets.

There were, however, opinions on Tripadvisor and elsewhere, that if you don’t look like a beggar (again!), then the airline check-in staff will not bother, and not ask you to show them your return flight ticket, although theoretically, they can. And if you don’t have one, and then they refuse to board you, they have every right to do so.

There is a website, where you can check if you are required to show additional documents to be able to board a flight: https://www.traveldoc.aero/. This site is sometimes used by airline staff, too. Now when I checked it, this is what it showed (you need to enter your nationality, date of birth etc.).

This is tricky. Because it says that you need either a return ticket, or “other acceptable evidence of onward/return travel”. Since I had a return flight to Europe from Kuala Lumpur (although that ticket was valid in five months’ time), I prepared for this scenario: I printed that ticket out, and I was prepared to explain them, should they ask, that I am not going to stay in Sri Lanka for ever, because I have this ridiculously expensive flight ticket back to Europe (which I couldn’t use eventually, because there came COVID – read about how I got stuck in the Philippines for 7 months in this post). I also printed out my hotel reservation, just in case I need to flood them with documents during an uncomfortable argument.

But none of these things were needed at all. First of all, I didn’t meet any staff members at check-in with Air Asia: I used the self check-in kiosk, and then the baggage drop service, where you print out your own baggage tag, stick it onto your luggage, put your bags on the the belt, and off you go. I only met human staff at the boarding gate, but they didn’t ask anyone about anything but your boarding pass and your passport.

I am not saying everyone can do this, but this was my experience, and if you use self check-in and self service baggage drop, then there is no-one to question you about return tickets or hotel reservations and whatnot.

Important update: anything can happen at the boarding gate!

Just a few weeks after my trip to Sri Lanka, I had to prepare for another stupid rule. I was travelling to the Philippines this time. The rules in the case of the Philippines are very similar to those with Sri Lanka. I did the same – self check-in, self service baggage drop -, and yes: at the boarding gate, just meters away from the actual aircraft, they did want me to show them a return flight ticket. You can read about it in more details here.