This is great news as I will be travelling to India in April.

Experiences with E-Visa
 

I'm wondering if anyone has had an experience yet with the new Indian E-Visa scheme. Does it work as smoothly as advertised?

In case you haven't read about it, info and the list of countries is here:
https://indianvisaonline.gov.in/visa/tvoa.html
Odd country inclusion/exclusion. US and Australia are in, but Canada and the UK are not.

This definitely looks like the way to go for me, as the Indian consulate in Toronto has backlogs of over a month.

Couple questions that crossed my mind that would be useful to address in this thread:

• Actual processing times
• Any odd issues with photo requirements
• Just what is "casual business" in the list of permitted uses.

Seems like a great spot for people to record their experiences going forward.

thread already exists here:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/india...ov-2014-a.html

Are there any US citizens who have had any experience with this yet? Planning to fly to India next month and this seems like the easiest and quickest way to obtain a visa. I meet the requirements, my main concern is the document check by the airline. In my past experience when traveling to India the airline would check the visa pretty thoroughly before allowing one to board. I assume most airlines have gotten the memo on TVOA by now, just curious if anyone has experienced any issues with this.

Well, one data point so far. Just applied on a Saturday...was approved in 15 hours. Pretty fast turnaround. Sure beats the 1.5 months the Toronto consulate is taking right now.

Same here--took about the same amount of time. I thought the application interface was not very intuitive, and my "confirmation" is an email. I had at least hoped for a pdf attachment :)

Yeah, I'll agree it's not very intuitive, but it beats the hell out of most visits to an Indian consulate! I had to futz around a lot to get documents to upload and to meet the file size/pixel count guideline.

The thing that almost threw me was trying to find the info on my previous Indian visa...took some time to track that down.

Now the next interesting data points will come at check-in and then at actual arrival. I'm hoping they paste a physical visa into the passport as everyone wants to see it when you check in at a hotel.

Inida visa on arrival - second best experiecne in the world
 

i helped my daughter apply on line...lots of questions and 2 uploads but the visa approval was received in 14 hours.

she flew by BA and they asked for a copy of the approval-email at check-in

she landed at BANgalore - very smooth, no delays or issues.

this TVoA is SUPER....why second best- i have travel many countries requiring visa...so far australia was the best and still is....they have electronic visa and the application was simpler and no photo upload.....india now second in my experience only because it needs a bit more work and a couple of tricky question.

KUDOS to the indian visa system...a load off after the bad news from outsourcing companies.

For those who already have a valid Indian Visa on an Expired US Passport.
 

Transfer of Tourist Visa

The Validity of an Existing Tourist Visa does not expire if a Visa holder acquires a New passport (if old passport has expired or is damaged), as long as his / her personal particulars (Name has remained the same and nationality of the holder has not changed.) The visa holder can travel carrying their old passport with a valid Indian Tourist Visa along with new passport.

However, if such a visa holder wishes to formally transfer the Tourist Visa for the remaining period of the duration of the visa onto the new passport; please refer to the information below. This is a purely an optional choice for applicants.




http://www.in.ckgs.us/visa/type-of-v...ist-visa.shtml

So I landed in BOM after the long flight from EWR and used the TVOA with absolutely zero problems. The agent didn't ask a single question, but it did take a minute or two to capture biometrics (fingerprints and photo).

Just a note, it's very easy to miss the correct counters for VOA in BOM as it's poorly signed. They are counters 1-8 which are just on your left when you first enter the immigration hall.

And one addendum...bring a print out for your airline. They need to see the "granted" status with your visa number. Agent said he's had to deny boarding to a couple people whose payments had not gone through and did not have "granted" status.

For someone who travels once a year to India on business (visiting another office of same employer for general meetings, etc) would you recommend getting another 5 year business visa(will expire before next trip)- or just doing this process once a year?

Hmm...I don't know really. Probably in terms of cost, it's roughly a wash of doing this once a year versus one business visa (depending on your nationality). The TVoA allows for "casual business" in addition to tourism...who knows that's defined as. If you're really there on a business visit, it seems a bit safer to use the business visa. Then again, for me, the Toronto consulate was such a mess, and business visas such a pain to get, that's why I chose TVoA.

If you visit India regularly, I'd recommend going for the 5 year business visa. They will only allow 2 TVoA per year, and who knows, they could limit the amount of TVoAs per person even further.

I've written one more blog post about the Indian Tourist Visa on Arrival procedure. Turns out they had trouble reading my fingerprints (this has never happened before) and they had no procedure in place for how to handle this.

http://willrunformiles.boardingarea.....i34RljkG.dpbs

I applied yesterday and received approval in 8 hours. Absolutely amazing turnaround time. I also previously had a question where I emailed [email protected] and received a reply within hours.

Hopefully this efficiency spreads to other parts of Indian government!