How to get an e-visa for Saudi Arabia?

At theDubaï World Expo in 2022, we visited the impressive pavilion of theSaudi Arabia which gave us an irrepressible urge to visit this country. When a Saudi employee asked us at the exit, we replied, “what a shame we can’t visit your country!”.

He replied: “of course you can visit Saudi Arabia”.
“Really?”
“Yes, you can go see my colleague over there, you’ll get your visa in 10 minutes”.

Woooow.

Indeed, since October 2019, the Kingdom has opened up to “non-religious tourism”. Saudi Arabia is preparing for “life after oil” and plans to develop tourism to make it a significant economic sector. Maybe it’s because of Covid that came right after, but we completely missed this information.

It’s almost three years later that we get the chance to go to Saudi Arabia and I’m dealing with this visa question.

For French citizens, it is possible to get the visa on arrival, but it’s also possible to apply for the eVisa before leaving, which always removes a bit of uncertainty.

Note that you won’t get a visa if your passport has an Israeli stamp.

Also note that this visa is not valid for pilgrimage.

As is often the case with online visa applications, there are many “scams”: sites that pose as the official site and charge you a much higher price and do the process on the official site for you.

The official site is here: https://visa.visitsaudi.com/Registration/Verify

The site is quite poorly designed. You have to choose between a group application or an individual one. I started with a group application but never found how to add a second person.

So I ended up doing a group application with only one person: me. Before doing an individual application for Anh. It didn’t cause any problems, but it’s not very logical.

Another issue: you must provide an ID photo, but it must be max 100kb, which isn’t much. I had to shrink our photos to make it work.

For arrival and departure dates, don’t worry, you don’t need to provide exact dates if you don’t know them. The idea is to check that you won’t stay longer than the permitted period. We gave approximate dates.

In addition to lacking user-friendliness, the site displays a countdown, you have to be fast, or else start all over again 😀

Including the mandatory insurance and transaction fees, the eVisa costs 402 SAR per person, which is just over 100 €. Remember to use a card that doesn’t charge you foreign transaction fees.

The price already includes medical insurance. It’s impossible to choose the insurer among the proposed logos but I think there’s simply no choice, you’re assigned one of the insurers at random.

Exactly three minutes after payment, I had my eVisa in my email inbox.