The eVisa era has made most travel paperwork genuinely easy — and created a new failure mode: treating a legal application like a checkout page. The same handful of errors accounts for the great majority of rejections and airport problems we see. Here they are, in rough order of frequency.
1. The wrong website
Covered fully in our copycat-sites guide, but it earns first place: paying triple on a lookalike portal, or worse. Government domains only.
2. Details that do not match the passport
Name order, middle names, transliteration, passport number read from a glare-y photo. Systems match strings, not intentions. Copy from the passport character by character, then have someone else check it against the document.
3. The wrong visa subtype
Tourist when the trip is functionally business; single-entry when the itinerary dips out and back (a side trip from India to Sri Lanka and back needs re-entry). The subtype question deserves thirty seconds of honesty about what the trip actually is.
4. Entry through the wrong port
Many eVisas are valid only at listed airports and seaports. Land borders are the classic trap — an Indian eVisa does not work walking in from Nepal.
5. Optimistic answers to screening questions
Prior refusals, arrests, certain travel history. The truthful inconvenient answer usually just routes you to more paperwork; the false convenient one, once discovered, contaminates every application you make anywhere for years.
6. Photo and upload failures
See our documents guide — background, glare, dimensions. The portal's rejection emails are terse; the fix is taking the specification literally the first time.
7. Applying at the last minute
"Usually 24–72 hours" contains the word usually. A random slice of clean applications go to manual review, and no fee expedites what a human has not yet picked up. Apply when you book, not when you pack.
The meta-habit under all seven: read what the portal actually says, answer what it actually asks, and give it the time it actually quotes. That, plus a second pair of eyes, is most of what a good visa service does — the rest is knowing what the portals do not say, which is where experience earns its fee.