Eritrean passport holders, whether in Asmara or in the diaspora, need an ETA approved before travelling to Colombo. It provides 30 days and two entries, and Eritrea is charged the standard government rate.
30 days
Stay on a tourist ETA
Double
Entries permitted
6 months
Passport validity needed
3 options
Tourist, Business, Transit
100% online
No embassy visit
Important for Eritrean citizens
Eritrean passports are charged the standard government rate for a tourist ETA; Eritrea is not part of the 40-country waiver. Refer to the live prices shown on this page for the amount.
Overview
Most Eritreans who apply for a Sri Lankan ETA are not living in Eritrea. They are residents of the Gulf states, Europe or North America who still travel on an Eritrean passport and want a holiday within easy reach of Dubai, Riyadh or Doha. A smaller number set out from Asmara itself, as seafarers joining ships in Colombo's port, students, or relatives visiting family abroad.
Sri Lanka asks every one of them for an Electronic Travel Authorisation, arranged ahead of the trip. You may know it as a Sri Lanka visa or e-visa; the terms describe the same online approval. No interview is involved and the passport never leaves your hands.
Eritrean passports raise two questions that other applicants seldom face: how to fit a three-part name with no family surname into a form built around surnames, and how to pay when your bank card comes from somewhere other than where you live. Both are dealt with below.
At a glance
Eligibility
Yes. Any Eritrean national visiting Sri Lanka for a short period needs an approved ETA, and where you live makes no difference. A residence permit from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia or a European state does not replace it, because the requirement follows the passport.
A tourist ETA is correct for holidays, for visiting friends and relatives, for medical or Ayurvedic treatment and for sporting or cultural events. Eritrea's cyclists have a following wherever they race, and travelling to watch or take part in a competition is a tourist purpose.
Joining a ship, attending meetings, negotiating a contract or taking a short training course is not. Those activities call for the business option or another arrangement made through an employer or shipping agent, so check before choosing the tourist form. Employment and self-employment are excluded, and journalists, political activists and NGO staff need Colombo's prior approval.
Each child travels on their own entry in the application. For children under 12 on a tourist visit of 30 days or less, the government charge is not levied, though Eritrean parents must still supply the child's passport details.
Stay & validity
Eritrean visitors receive 30 days and two entries on a tourist ETA. The 30 days are counted once, from the first landing. Leave for a weekend in the Maldives and you come back to the balance, so a traveller who returns on day 20 has ten days remaining.
The approval can be used to arrive for the first time during the six months after it is granted, and its printed conditions are final. On the day of arrival your Eritrean passport must have at least six months left. Renewal through an Eritrean embassy can take a long time, so look at the expiry date well before planning, and remember that a renewed passport means a new ETA.
To stay beyond the period granted you need an extension from the Department of Immigration and Emigration, which has its head office at Battaramulla near Colombo. Apply while your original permission is still valid.
Pricing
Live fees for Eritrean passport holders, shown all-in — any government charge that applies to your passport and our service fee together, with nothing added later.
Your nationality is pre-selected as Eritrea
Requirements
Everything Eritrean passport holders need before starting an application. The first five items apply to every applicant; the rest are specific to your nationality.
Passport valid for at least six months from the date you arrive in Sri Lanka — the same passport you will travel on
A clear image of the passport bio-data page, with every corner visible and no glare over the photograph
A working email address, which is where the approval is sent and which you should be able to open while travelling
A credit or debit card for online payment
Your intended arrival date and an address in Sri Lanka, such as your first hotel
Simple process
Four steps, entirely online, with one form per traveller and a full review before you pay.
Pick the Tourist, Business or Transit option that matches the real purpose of your trip, and add every traveller in your party to the same application.
Give each traveller's details exactly as printed on the passport, plus the intended arrival date and an address in Sri Lanka. Entries are made in English.
Check every name, date and passport number on the review screen before paying. Corrections are simple at this stage and difficult afterwards.
The approval is linked electronically to your passport number. Keep a copy on your phone and a printout with your travel documents for check-in and arrival.
Decisions for Eritrean applicants tend to arrive in one to two days, but no service can fix the time. We compare the name fields with the machine-readable lines of the passport before sending the form on, because that is where three-part names most often end up in the wrong order.
Send the application three to five days before travel at the very least. Asmara is two and a half hours behind Colombo, and Gulf residents are closer still at an hour and a half. Those leaving from Eritrea itself must also have completed their own country's exit formalities, which are separate from the ETA and can take far longer.
Plan further ahead around 24 May, Independence Day, and the Orthodox feasts of Christmas on 7 January and Timket later that month, when many diaspora Eritreans are travelling.
On arrival
An approved ETA gets you on the plane. This is what happens once you land, and how to make the arrival as quick as possible.
Bandaranaike International Airport at Katunayake, about 30 kilometres north of Colombo, handles nearly all international arrivals. Follow the signs to immigration and join the foreign passport queue.
The officer retrieves your ETA from the passport number. Have the approval email to hand as a backup, on paper or saved offline, since airport connectivity is not guaranteed.
You may be asked where you are staying, how long for and when you leave. A hotel confirmation and your return ticket answer all three in a few seconds.
Your passport is endorsed with the date you must leave by. Read it at the counter — that date, not the length of your booking, is what counts if your plans change.
Getting there
Asmara has few international departures, and none goes to South Asia. The most direct option from Eritrea is flydubai to Dubai, where Emirates and flydubai both run onward flights to Colombo. Turkish Airlines via Istanbul is a longer alternative, and services through Cairo or Jeddah need a further connection. Schedules from Asmara are thin and change with little warning, so confirm them before applying. Eritreans living in the Gulf have a far simpler trip, with nonstop flights to Colombo of four to five hours from their city of residence.
Best time to go
Asmara sits more than two thousand metres up and stays mild all year, while Massawa on the Red Sea is among the hottest places on earth. Sri Lanka at sea level will feel closer to the coast than to the highlands, so travellers from the capital should expect real humidity.
From December to March the weather is dry on the western and southern shores and cool in the hills around Nuwara Eliya, whose altitude and eucalyptus will seem oddly familiar to anyone from the Eritrean plateau. January, after Orthodox Christmas, is a favourite month for families travelling from Europe and the Gulf.
Eritrea's main rains fall in July and August, the same months in which the south-west of Sri Lanka is wet and the east coast dry. Holidaymakers escaping the Gulf summer at that time do best at Trincomalee or Pasikudah, and Kandy holds its Esala Perahera procession in the same weeks.
Travellers keeping the Orthodox fasts will have no difficulty eating in Sri Lanka, where vegetable curries, dhal and rice are everyday food. Muslim Eritreans will find mosques and halal restaurants throughout Colombo and along the east coast. Poya full-moon days close offices once a month, and the April New Year shuts much of the country briefly.
Avoid these
Problems are rare, and almost always technical rather than substantive. These are the ones that come up most often on applications from Eritrea — worth a minute now rather than a new application later.
Eritrean naming runs given name, father's name, grandfather's name. Forms abroad have taught many Eritreans to treat one of these as a surname, and different documents may disagree on which. For the ETA only the passport's own layout matters, and the airline ticket should copy it too.
Tigrinya is written in Ge'ez script and has no single Latin spelling, so the same person can be Tesfay on a passport and Tesfai on a German residence card, or Ghebremariam in one place and Gebremariam in another. An ETA under the residence-card spelling will not match at immigration.
This page concerns Eritrean national passports. Eritreans who have since naturalised should apply as citizens of their new country if that is the passport they travel on, and many such countries fall within Sri Lanka's waiver of the government charge. Anyone holding a different kind of travel document should confirm its acceptance with a Sri Lankan mission before paying.
Cards issued inside Eritrea are seldom set up for foreign internet purchases, and applicants discover this only at the final screen. Arrange in advance for someone with a suitable card to pay, and give them the exact details from your passport instead of asking them to complete the form from memory.
Passport number mistyped
The authorisation attaches to the number you enter. One wrong character produces an ETA that does not match the passport handed over at the counter, and a paid application cannot be edited afterwards.
Passport with under six months left
Sri Lanka expects six months of validity counted from the day you arrive, not the day you apply. A passport that falls short is refused at check-in regardless of the ETA.
The wrong ETA type
Attending meetings or a conference on a tourist ETA is outside its conditions. Choose the option that matches what you will actually do in the country.
Conditions
These conditions are set by Sri Lanka's Department of Immigration and Emigration and do not vary by nationality.
Sri Lanka requires an Electronic Travel Authorisation for short visits by all foreign nationals, and it should be approved before you travel. Even where the government charge is waived, the authorisation itself is still required.
The authorisation is recorded against the passport number you enter. If that passport is lost, replaced or renewed before you travel, the ETA does not move across and a new application is needed.
A tourist ETA allows two entries. The stay period runs from your first arrival, so a second entry is granted only the balance of that period rather than a fresh allowance.
A tourist ETA covers holidays, family visits, medical treatment and cultural or sporting events. Business meetings, conferences and short training need the business option, and a stopover of up to two days uses the transit option.
Immigration officers at the port of entry may ask for a confirmed return or onward ticket and evidence that you can support yourself for the length of your stay.
An approved ETA lets you travel to Sri Lanka. The decision to admit you is made by an immigration officer on arrival, and the conditions printed on your approval govern your stay.
Consular services
Sri Lanka has no embassy in Asmara, and its ambassador in Cairo is accredited to Eritrea as well. Eritrean applicants do not need to deal with that embassy for an ETA, which is issued online wherever they happen to live. It handles only requests that fall outside the ETA.
FAQs
The questions Eritrean passport holders ask most often about travelling to Sri Lanka.
Yes. Eritrean citizens need an Electronic Travel Authorisation, the online approval commonly called a Sri Lanka visa, before travelling. Its tourist form gives an Eritrean visitor 30 days and two entries. Eritrea is charged the standard government rate.
Yes. The application is made online from wherever you are, and your country of residence does not change the rules. You apply as an Eritrean national with your Eritrean passport details, and a Gulf residence permit is not a substitute for the ETA.
Follow the passport field by field. If it shows your given name in one line and your father's and grandfather's names in another, reproduce that arrangement and that spelling. Do not adopt the version used on a residence permit or bank card.
No. Eritrea is outside the group of 40 countries covered by the waiver that began on 25 May 2026. Children under 12 are not charged the government fee on a tourist stay of up to 30 days. What an Eritrean applicant pays in total is given in the live prices shown on this page.
Apply under the nationality of the passport you will travel with. If that is your Swedish passport, you apply as a Swedish citizen, and Sweden is included in the waiver of the government charge. The ETA is tied to that passport's number and cannot be used with another.
Through Dubai. flydubai links Asmara with Dubai, and there are several daily flights from Dubai to Colombo. Allow 10 to 13 hours in total, and check that the Asmara schedule is still operating on your dates.
No later than three to five days before the flight, and sooner around Orthodox Christmas, Independence Day or Eid. Approvals mostly come within a day or two, though that cannot be guaranteed. An approved ETA remains usable for a first arrival for six months.
No. It authorises you to travel, and the immigration officer in Colombo decides on admission. Carrying your return ticket, accommodation details and proof of funds, together with the passport used in the application, puts you in the best position.
Your nationality is already set to Eritrea. Complete the form in around ten minutes, review every detail, and receive your ETA by email.
Other nationalities
Charges, routes and the practical details differ by passport. Here are the guides for other nationalities.
