Seychelles for Indian Citizens: The Official Site Is a .com, and That Is the Problem

Every other article in this series ends up giving the same piece of advice about fake visa websites: check the domain, and trust the government suffix. For Seychelles, that advice will send you the wrong way.

Seychelles requires no visa from anyone, Indian passports included. What it does require, before you board, is a paid Travel Authorisation filed through the Seychelles Electronic Border System. And the official address for that system is seychelles.govtas.com — a .com, run for the government by a contracted border-security company. Meanwhile the actual Seychellois government domains, ics.gov.sc for Immigration and mfa.gov.sc for Foreign Affairs, are where the rules are published but not where you apply.

A careful traveller applying the standard heuristic would look at that .com and close the tab. A careless one would land on a copycat and pay four times the fee. Tourism Seychelles has publicly warned about exactly that second scenario, after immigration officers at the airport met arriving travellers who had paid a third-party site, found their authorisation was never processed, and had to pay again.

The paid step is not the permission, and the permission is free

Seychelles splits entry into two documents, and they are the opposite way round from what most travellers assume.

• The Travel Authorisation is the paid one, and it is not a visa. It exists, in the government’s own words, to strengthen border security and give the authorities visibility of who intends to travel. You file it online before departure, you pay for it, and it is valid for a single journey — it expires the moment you exit Seychelles. Come back next year and you buy another.
• The Visitor’s Permit is the free one, and it is the actual permission. Immigration issues it on arrival, at no charge, for a stay of up to three months. It covers holidays, pleasure, business and visiting friends or family.

To be granted the permit you must not be a prohibited immigrant, must not already hold a permit entitling you to reside in Seychelles, must hold a valid return or onward ticket, and must have sufficient funds for the visit. Guides commonly quote a benchmark of around USD 150 per person per day; we could not confirm that figure from a Seychellois government source, so treat it as indicative of the expectation rather than a published threshold.

Replacing the domain test with one that works

Since the suffix cannot tell you what is genuine here, use provenance instead. Do not search for "Seychelles travel authorisation" and click a result. Instead, start at a confirmed Seychellois government page — mfa.gov.sc or ics.gov.sc — and follow the link they publish to the application portal. Both direct travellers to seychelles.govtas.com or to the Seychelles E-Border app. Arriving at the .com through a .gov.sc page is what makes it verifiable; the address bar alone cannot.

Faster processing tiers are reported to exist — around €30 for roughly six-hour handling and €70 for about an hour — which is worth knowing so that a higher price is not automatically read as fraud. We could not verify those two figures from a primary source. Read the tier and the total on the portal itself.

The uploads are the real work

The form is short but the evidence is substantive, and this is where applications stall. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs lists what you need:

• A valid passport.
• A selfie.
• Contact details and trip information.
• An airline booking confirmation that clearly shows both your arrival and your departure dates.
• An accommodation booking confirmation for each location of your stay — the name of the hotel or guesthouse, the boat charter name, or the name of your employer. If you are staying with friends or family, a letter of invitation instead.
• Credit or debit card details for the fee.

That per-location requirement is the one to plan around. A Seychelles trip is usually an island-hopping trip — a few nights on Mahé, a few on Praslin, a few on La Digue — and every one of those stays needs its own confirmed booking uploaded. You cannot file the authorisation with a vague plan to sort out La Digue later. Book the whole chain first, then apply.

Two official sources disagree about when to apply

The Seychelles Ministry of Foreign Affairs says you may apply up to 10 days before your flight, and recommends applying as early as possible within that. Other official guidance, including the entry-requirements briefing published by the US State Department for its own travellers, says the authorisation may be applied for no more than 30 days before travel.

We cannot reconcile those from the outside, and the practical answer is to work to the tighter one. Applying inside the final ten days satisfies both readings; applying three weeks out satisfies only one of them. Standard processing is about a day, so ten days is a comfortable margin rather than a rush — file it once your last accommodation booking is confirmed and you are done.

The short version

• No visa. But the Travel Authorisation is mandatory and must be approved before you board.
• Apply at seychelles.govtas.com — reached via mfa.gov.sc or ics.gov.sc, not via a search result.
• Expect about €10 to €12 all-in per person, children included. Far more than that is a copycat site.
• Upload flights showing both dates, and a confirmed booking for every island you sleep on.
• File within ten days of departure — that window satisfies every version of the official guidance.
• The free Visitor’s Permit is issued on arrival for up to three months; extensions cost SCR 5,000 per block.
• The authorisation covers one journey only and dies when you fly home.

Seychelles is genuinely one of the easiest countries in the world for an Indian passport to enter — no visa, no embassy, no interview, and a permit handed over free at the airport. The single thing standing in the way is a ten-euro form that half the internet is trying to sell you for a hundred.