In 2020 Indonesia implemented an electronic visa (E-visa) system which makes the life of travellers much easier. Firstly, you can obtain your visa online before arriving in Indonesia. Secondly, you can extend your tourist visa within only a minute instead of visiting a local immigration office and wasting at least 3-4 days. The E-visa system is helpful for foreign travellers who visit the country for tourism, business, or social-cultural purposes.
While the whole process for applying was quite smooth, my partner and I discovered some issues when extending our tourist visas for Indonesia. After some research I realized that other people also had issues with the activation link and not being able to log into their imigrasi profile. With this blogpost I’d like to share possible solutions and create an up to date space to discuss upcoming problems and help each other on how to fix them.
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Main objectives of the Indonesian E-visa
The Indonesian E-Visa system is super helpful as it saves you time at the immigration counter when arriving in the country. You also don’t have to adapt your route to physically visit one of the immigration offices in order to extend your tourist visa.
I applied for the Single-Entry Visitor Visa (B211A) 3 days before arriving in Indonesia. Some posts online suggest that the e-visa takes 3 to 4 business days to process. In my case however it only took a few seconds. After filling out the online forms and transferring the payment I immediately received the visa via e-mail and pdf. Just follow the steps on the official E-visa Website for Indonesia to obtain your visa.
When I arrived in Indonesia I showed the digital pdf at the immigration counter and they put a sticker with the visa information into my passport. All in all a much faster process than going through the normal visa on arrival process.
Indonesian E-Visa issue & fix
This blogpost contains the issue I’ve had so far with using the Indonesian E-Visa platform. If you have experienced different ones please share them in the comments below! I can then tell you more about how it worked for me or other travellers can suggest a solution.
I tried to contact the E-visa team via Facebook and E-Mail but even after 4 days waiting there had not been any reaction. If you really can’t fix your problem I suggest to go to the closest immigration office instead and process your visa application or extension in person. I doubt that the immigration would care about technical issues with the E-visa system when you leave Indonesia and have overstayed.
Update 12/2023: Thanks to everyone for commenting under this blogpost & trying to help each other out! In general, if you can’t find a way to extend your visa or the extension button doesn’t work I recommend to find the nearest immigration and get it done there. You should be able to extend your visa 1-2 weeks before it expires. Don’t wait for the last day, hoping it would work. If it doesn’t allow you to extend from the beginning, it’s not likely it will work at all.
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Account not active and log in not possible
Please note: Make sure to first go through the application steps to obtain your visa: https://molina.imigrasi.go.id/web/visa-selection. This should work without the account activation.
When I created my profile (gmx e-mail address) on the E-visa platform I immediately received an activation link and could easily log into my profile a month later when I wanted to extend my visa. My partner however never received that activation link and was therefore not able to log into his profile. The E-visa system showed the following message: Profile not activated. However there was no option to resend the activation link or access the profile. He therefore thought he wouldn’t be able to extend his visa online.
Possible fix: You don’t necessarily need to log into the E-visa system to access and extend your visa.
Option A: You should have received an e-mail from ‘DIREKTORAT JENDERAL IMIGRASI REPUBLIK INDONESIA <no-reply@imigrasi.go.id>’ with the subject ‘Indonesia Immigration One Platform System – EVISA’. This e-mail confirms that your visa application has been received and contains a link to check your visa status. If you click on that link it will forward you to a page where you can download your E-visa. On the visa document is a QR-code at the bottom of the page. Just scan the QR-Code. It will forward you to a page looking like the one below.
Click on ‘extend’ and then follow the steps to extend your Indonesian E-visa. No password, activated account or log in details needed. If you have never received that e-mail I don’t know how to access the page unfortunately as the link doesn’t contain either batch or visa number and is therefore not rebuildable.
Option B: A traveller shared the following link in the comments below and found a way to find and extend the visa through it: https://molina.imigrasi.go.id/web/find-batch.
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Do you need further help?
Summing up: If you receive the activation email right after making the first application, make sure to activate your profile right away. Then you shouldn’t have a problem to extend your visa. Also make sure to save the email leading to the batch where you can access the pdf of the E-visa which contains the QR-code. If you have one or both of these things then there shouldn’t be any problems to extend!
Have you experienced other issues with your e-visa? Are you stuck? Let me know in the comments below and we can try to find a solution together with this travel community!
