Questions and straight answers

An Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) is a digital permission to travel to the United Kingdom. It is not a visa. It is linked electronically to your passport, and it lets you travel to the UK for tourism, visiting family, business meetings, short study or transit. It does not guarantee entry — a Border Force officer still makes the final decision when you arrive.

2 years, or until your passport expires — whichever comes first. Within that period you can travel to the UK as many times as you like, staying up to 6 months on each visit. Since 9 April 2026 the same ETA also covers Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.

No. Your ETA is tied electronically to the passport you applied with. If you get a new passport you must apply for a new ETA, even if the old one had years left to run, and you must travel on the passport your ETA is linked to.

You need one if you are a national of a country that does not require a visa for short visits to the UK, and you do not already hold a UK visa or other UK immigration permission. Since 25 February 2026 the requirement covers over 80 nationalities, including all Gulf states, the United States, Canada, Australia and every EU and EEA country. Children of every age need their own ETA.

British and Irish citizens, including dual citizens — if you hold a British or Irish passport you cannot apply for an ETA and must travel on that passport. You also do not need one if you already have a UK visa or any other UK immigration permission, or if you are a visa-exempt national legally resident in Ireland travelling within the Common Travel Area, provided you can prove that residence.

No. An ETA is only for nationalities that do not need a visa to visit the UK. Holders of Iranian, Iraqi, Egyptian, Jordanian, Lebanese, Syrian, Yemeni, Turkish, Indian and Pakistani passports, among many others, must apply for a Standard Visitor visa instead. Applying for an ETA you are not eligible for wastes both the fee and your time — we will tell you before you pay, and we will not take payment for an ETA you cannot use.

It depends on whether you pass through UK border control. Passengers transiting airside — staying in the international area at Heathrow or Manchester without going through passport control — are currently exempt. If you transit landside, pass through UK border control, or connect at any other UK airport, you do need an ETA. The Home Office has stated this airside exemption is temporary and under review, so check before you fly.

The official Home Office fee is £20 per person, which rose from £16 on 8 April 2026. Through us you pay £49 in total: the £20 official fee, which we pay to the Home Office on your behalf and never mark up, plus our £29 service fee for document checking, Arabic-language support and free resubmission if your application is refused for a correctable error. You are always free to apply yourself on GOV.UK and pay only £20.

The Home Office does not refund the official fee for a refused application, and neither we nor anyone else can change that. What we do: if the refusal is caused by an error in the information we submitted, we prepare and pay for a fresh application at our own cost. If the refusal is because of your immigration or criminal history, or because you were not eligible for an ETA at all, we refund our £29 service fee in full — see our Refund Policy. A refusal usually means you need to apply for a Standard Visitor visa, which we can also help with.

You are absolutely right that you can, and for a straightforward application in English it is often the sensible choice — we would rather tell you that than take your money. People use us when the form is not straightforward: when they need it explained and completed in Arabic, when a past visa refusal or a criminal record makes the suitability questions risky to answer alone, when a family of six needs filing at once without a mistake, or when they simply want a named person to chase it. That is the service the £29 pays for, and nothing else.

Most applications get an automatic decision within minutes, and the Home Office says the great majority are decided within 3 working days. A minority are pulled for manual review and take longer. Apply at least 3 working days before you fly, and never book non-refundable travel on the assumption that your ETA will be granted.

A valid biometric passport from an eligible country, a digital photograph of your face that meets the GOV.UK standard, a working email address, a payment card, and honest answers to the suitability and criminality questions. You do not need travel bookings, hotel reservations, bank statements or an invitation letter — an ETA application asks for none of those.

Yes. Every traveller needs their own ETA regardless of age, including newborns, and each one costs the full £20 official fee. A parent or guardian completes the application on the child's behalf. We file family groups together so nobody is left behind at check-in.

Your application is transmitted over an encrypted connection and stored encrypted at rest. Card details never touch our servers at all — payment is handled entirely by Stripe on their own hosted checkout page. We keep your application data only as long as we need it to provide the service and to meet our record-keeping obligations, then delete it. You can ask us to delete it sooner, or send you a copy of everything we hold, at any time. The full detail is in our Privacy Policy.