Cambodia e-Arrival Card: Field-by-Field Walkthrough for Australians (2026)

Why the e-Arrival is the form most Aussies fill the worst

Most Australians treat the Cambodia eVisa with the seriousness it deserves — slow down, read every field, double-check the passport number, get the photo right, do the upload at a desk instead of on the train. Then the eVisa PDF lands, the trip feels sorted, and a few weeks later the e-Arrival reminder pops up. Seven minutes on a phone in bed at 11pm the night before flying. No second pair of eyes on it. Off it goes.

That gap — the careful eVisa followed by the rushed e-Arrival — is the single biggest source of slow-lane immigration moments for Aussies at Cambodian airports. Cambodian Immigration's kiosk software cross-references the e-Arrival against your passport chip and your eVisa record, and any drift between the three sends you to the manual desk. The visa is right, the trip is fine, but you spend 25 minutes at a desk on the wrong side of a 7-hour flight.

This walkthrough is a field-by-field pass through the 14-field form, written for the specific way Australians get it wrong. It pairs with the standalone Cambodia e-Arrival form guide for the wider context, but the depth here is in the actual data-entry decisions — what the MRZ wants, which date format Cambodia uses, the accommodation string Cambodian Immigration cross-checks against, and how to tick the customs and health boxes honestly without triggering a manual review.

The 14 fields at a glance — five blocks, three failure modes

The e-Arrival splits into five blocks across roughly three screens. Each block has its own logic and its own most-common Aussie failure mode. The form itself is conceptually simple — none of the fields are hard — but the kiosk is character-strict on the data it expects, and a single typo in the wrong place sends you off the e-gate lane and onto the manual desk.

Passport block (4 fields)

The first block is the one with the highest cost if you get it wrong, because the kiosk reads your passport chip in real time and compares it against what you submitted. The fields are: full name, passport number, nationality, and date of birth. All four have to match the passport bio page character-for-character. The trap is the full name — Australians who go by 'Tom' enter Tom even though the passport says THOMAS, and the kiosk catches it.

Flight & accommodation block (5 fields)

The middle block is the one that moves between application and arrival. Inbound flight number, arrival date, arrival airport, accommodation name, and accommodation address. The flight number is straightforward; the airport is straightforward as long as you remember KTI replaced PNH for Phnom Penh in September 2025. The accommodation pair is where most Aussies trip — the kiosk compares the e-Arrival string against the eVisa address, and a mismatch flags a manual review.

Customs & health block (5 fields)

The last block is conceptually the easiest but the one Aussies rush through. Cash declaration (yes/no for amounts over USD 10,000), goods declaration (commercial or restricted items), purpose of visit, health symptoms, and recent country visits in the last 14 days. The threshold is USD 10,000, not AUD — a common Aussie error is reading the question as 'over AUD 10,000' and missing the conversion. Three of these five are yes/no boxes; tick them honestly and you sail through.

Field-by-field walkthrough — the passport block (4 fields)

The passport block is the four-field opening of the form. It is also the most-checked block because Cambodian Immigration's kiosk reads the passport chip on arrival and matches the data against what you submitted. The trick is to copy from the passport itself, not from memory.

Field 1 — Full name. The e-Arrival expects the name exactly as it appears on the passport bio page, which is the same as what is encoded in the machine-readable zone (MRZ). The MRZ is the two lines of capital letters and chevrons at the bottom of the photo page, and it reads something like P<AUSSMITH<<THOMAS<JOHN<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<. The surname comes first, then the chevrons, then the given names in order. If your passport says THOMAS JOHN SMITH, enter exactly that — including the middle name. Aussies who routinely shorten Thomas to Tom or skip 'John' because they never use it get caught here.

Field 2 — Passport number. The Australian passport number is a single letter followed by 7 digits (like N1234567), or in some recent renewals a different alphanumeric pattern. Type it from the bio page, not from memory, and watch the classic confusables: O versus 0 (zero), I versus 1, and a slightly stylised 6 that some Aussies read as G. The kiosk is character-strict and one wrong character is a mismatch.

Field 3 — Nationality. Australian. Pick AUS from the dropdown, not AUSTRALIA written out long-form (most forms have both — pick the three-letter code if it is available, as that matches the MRZ). Dual citizens travelling on the Australian passport must pick Australian even if they hold and prefer the other passport — the kiosk reads the passport you arrive on, not the one you feel most attached to. The Cambodia eVisa documents required for Australians guide covers the dual-citizen edge case in more detail.

Field 4 — Date of birth. Cambodia uses DD/MM/YYYY — day, then month, then full four-digit year. So 4 May 1985 is 04/05/1985, not 05/04/1985. For Australians this should be intuitive — it is the same convention we use at home — but the autofill on many travel-form keyboards defaults to US MM/DD/YYYY, and a small subset of phone keyboards push the US format silently. If your date of birth has a day under 13, slow down and re-read before submitting; this is the field a US autofill quietly flips most often.

Field-by-field walkthrough — flight and accommodation (5 fields)

The middle block of the e-Arrival is the one that ties your form to the rest of your trip — your flight, your arrival airport, and where Cambodian Immigration expects to find you for the first night. Five fields in total. The first three are easy; the last two are where almost every accommodation-mismatch rejection comes from.

Field 5 — Inbound flight number. Airline code plus flight number, no space between them. QF023 is correct; QF 023 is wrong; QF23 is wrong (the leading zero matters). Bangkok Airways flights are PG; Singapore Airlines is SQ; AirAsia is AK or D7 depending on the leg; Vietjet is VJ. Take the flight number directly from the airline booking email or your boarding pass — do not paraphrase it from memory. If you are on a codeshare and your ticket shows two flight numbers, use the operating carrier's number, not the marketing one.

Field 6 — Arrival date. DD/MM/YYYY, local Cambodian date. This is the field where Aussies on late-night flights from Sydney or Melbourne get caught: you board on Wednesday evening in Australia, fly through the night, and land in Cambodia on Thursday morning local time. The arrival date is Thursday — not Wednesday. The flight number tells the kiosk what to expect, so a Thursday flight number paired with a Wednesday arrival date is a mismatch flag.

Field 7 — Arrival airport. The dropdown lists three airports for international air arrivals: KTI (Techo International Airport, Phnom Penh — the new airport that replaced PNH on 9 September 2025), SAI (Siem Reap-Angkor International Airport), and KOS (Sihanoukville International Airport). Pick the airport your flight actually lands at, not the city you are headed to next. If you are connecting through Bangkok or Singapore and on to Siem Reap, your arrival airport is SAI. The Cambodia airports guide for Australians breaks down each airport in detail.

Field 8 — Accommodation name. The full hotel or homestay name as it appears on your booking confirmation. Cambodian Immigration's system cross-checks this against the accommodation name on your eVisa application. If the two strings differ — even by a hotel renaming, a typo, or a switch from one Siem Reap guesthouse to another between applications — the kiosk pauses you. The fix is small: copy the accommodation name from your eVisa, word-for-word, into the e-Arrival, even if you have since changed bookings.

Field 9 — Full street address. Cambodian Immigration wants a structured address, ideally: street number and name, then sangkat (commune) or district, then city. So '#123, Street 240, Sangkat Chey Chumneah, Daun Penh, Phnom Penh' is a clean fill. The trap is truncating it on a phone — autofill often drops the district, and the kiosk reads a stripped address as incomplete. If your accommodation is genuinely not booked yet, the workaround Cambodian Immigration accepts is the name and city of the hotel you most plan to stay at, with 'Hotel TBD' added to the end of the address line — the kiosk treats this as a known placeholder rather than a missing field.

Field-by-field walkthrough — customs and health (5 fields)

The last block is the easiest to fill and the easiest to skip. Five yes/no fields — three customs, two health. The form will not submit without all five answered, so the trap is not really skipping them; it is rushing through and ticking the wrong box. The rule is simple: tick honestly. The Cambodian customs and health declarations are not designed to catch tourists out, and saying yes to any of them is a quick conversation at a side desk, not a refused entry.

Field 10 — Cash declaration. The question is whether you are bringing in cash equivalent to USD 10,000 or more. The threshold is in US dollars, not Australian dollars. AUD 10,000 is roughly USD 6,500, which is below the threshold — so an Australian carrying AUD 10,000 in cash answers no. An Australian carrying AUD 16,000 in cash is over the USD 10,000 line and answers yes. Travellers cheques and bearer instruments count toward the same line. Saying yes triggers a 5-minute conversation at the customs desk, where you fill a short form and walk through. Saying no when you should have said yes is the offence.

Field 11 — Goods declaration. The question is whether you are bringing commercial goods (items for sale or business), restricted goods (controlled drugs, certain agricultural products, weapons), or items over the duty-free allowance (in practice, this is rare for tourists; the allowance is generous). Standard tourist luggage — clothes, electronics for personal use, a couple of bottles of duty-free spirits — is a clean no. If you are a Business eVisa traveller bringing samples, brochures, or product prototypes, that is a yes and is handled at customs without drama.

Field 12 — Visit purpose. Tourism, business, transit, or other. Match this to the visa class you applied for. If you have a Tourist eVisa, pick tourism; if you have a Business eVisa, pick business. A mismatch here — Business eVisa with 'tourism' ticked, or Tourist eVisa with 'business' ticked — is one of the kiosk's automatic flag conditions, because Cambodian Immigration pulls your visa class and compares. Aussies travelling on the broader Business eVisa product for meetings, conferences, or work-related visits should pick business. The Cambodia Business eVisa guide for Australians covers what counts.

Field 13 — Health symptoms. The question is whether you have fever, cough, breathing difficulty, severe diarrhoea, or rash. For almost every Australian on a normal trip, the answer is no — tick no and move on. If you do genuinely have any of those symptoms on arrival, tick yes; you will be directed to a health desk for a quick check, not refused entry. The form is designed around quarantine-era contingencies and is much less aggressive in 2026 than it was in 2024.

Field 14 — Recent country visits in the last 14 days. The dropdown lets you list every country you have been physically present in for the past 14 days. Cambodian Immigration cares about this primarily for yellow fever — if you have transited or stayed in a yellow-fever endemic country (much of sub-Saharan Africa and tropical South America) you may be asked to show a yellow fever vaccination certificate. For Aussies on a typical Sydney–Bangkok–Phnom Penh route, the answer is just Australia and Thailand; no further action needed.

After you submit — QR generation, email, what the kiosk does with it

Hit submit and the e-Arrival portal runs the data through Cambodian Immigration's checking system in real time. The validation is mostly format — date formats, character counts on the passport number, valid airport codes — rather than substantive cross-checks. For a clean submission, the QR code is generated and emailed within 5–30 minutes of submitting, usually closer to 5 minutes than 30.

Save the QR code to your phone (download the PDF, take a screenshot, send it to yourself on a different email address — pick at least two of those), and print one A4 backup copy on plain white paper to live in your carry-on. The kiosk reader works fine off a phone screen, but phones go flat, screens crack, and email apps occasionally cull old messages mid-flight. The printed copy is the cheap insurance against the airport-floor moment of dread.

On arrival at KTI, SAI, or KOS you step off the airbridge into a quiet arrivals hall, follow the e-gate signs, and present passport plus QR code at the reader. The kiosk reads the passport chip, pulls the eVisa from Cambodian Immigration's record, scans the QR code from your e-Arrival, cross-checks all three, takes a fingerprint, takes a photo, and prints a stamp slip. For a clean file, the whole sequence is 90 seconds and you are through. The do-Australians-need-Cambodia-visa pillar covers what happens if something does not match.

Three small things help on the day. First, open the QR code on your phone before you join the e-gate queue — do not wait until you reach the reader to dig through email. Second, switch to airplane mode plus WiFi off before queueing, so a wandering cell tower does not pull the email out of view mid-scan. Third, if you are travelling as a family, queue together but go through one at a time; the kiosk processes one passport at a time, and the system is calmer when the previous transaction has fully cleared.

Putting it together for Aussie travellers

The Cambodia e-Arrival is fourteen fields, five blocks, and three Aussie failure modes. Match the name to the MRZ, use DD/MM/YYYY everywhere, copy the eVisa accommodation address word-for-word, pick KTI not PNH for Phnom Penh, tick the customs and health boxes honestly. Submit inside the 7-day window before flight, save the QR code in two places, and the kiosk is 90 seconds. If reading every field carefully against your passport and your eVisa sounds like seven minutes of friction you would rather skip, the $5 USD (~$7.50 AUD) verified e-Arrival handles that pass for you — every field checked end-to-end, the QR code delivered ready to scan, free re-submission if Immigration's server hiccups. The Smartraveller advisory for Cambodia is worth a five-minute read before you commit to dates, and is updated by DFAT whenever the regional picture shifts.

If you have not lodged the eVisa yet, do that first — the eVisa lead time is 3 business days, and the e-Arrival has a 7-day window before flight, so the sequence is always eVisa first, then e-Arrival inside the last week. The Australian application walkthrough covers the eVisa step by step, and the rejection-fix guide is worth a glance for the small-but-real chance that something needs adjusting.

Next steps and related reading for Australians: apply for your Cambodia eVisa when you are ready to lodge, bookmark our Cambodia visa hub for Australian citizens as the single canonical reference, skim the FAQ on Cambodia visa e arrival for quick answers, and use our glossary of Cambodia visa terms to decode any acronym in this guide.