What Happens to Your Money if a Cambodia eVisa Is Rejected? US Applicant Guide

How free resubmission actually works

Free resubmission is the mechanism that turns a scary-sounding "rejection" into a minor errand. When an application is flagged, you get an email that names the problem in plain language — not a generic error code, but "the photo shows a smile, please re-upload a neutral expression" or "the passport scan has glare on the lower edge, please retake without flash." You fix that one thing and send it back. The same application, with the same fee already attached, goes back into the processing queue. No new payment screen, no second $80 USD.

The clock is the part people miss. Your 3-business-day approval window runs on the application, and a fast correction keeps it moving rather than resetting it to zero. If you reply to a flag the same day, you have lost hours, not days. The travelers who turn a flag into a missed flight are the ones who let the email sit in their inbox for a week — not the ones who were charged a penalty. Speed of response, not money, is the real variable here.

This is why we frame it as an outcome, not a workflow: a flagged application is resubmitted free rather than re-billed, and it is checked end-to-end before it reaches Cambodian Immigration so the correction passes the second time. You are not paying again for the privilege of fixing a typo. If a flag does land, you can correct each field and resend, and our list of Cambodia eVisa application mistakes to avoid shows what trips Americans up before they submit.

When a true refund applies

Because free resubmission handles the flagged cases, a literal refund is reserved for situations where money should not have left your account in the first place. There are two clean examples, and both are about the charge, not the application outcome.

The first is a duplicate charge. If a checkout hiccup or a double-tap on "submit" billed your card twice for one application, the extra charge is returned to the original US card. Before you assume a double-billing, though, check your statement twice: when you submit a payment, US banks often place a temporary authorization hold that looks like a second charge but has not actually moved money. A duplicate that appears minutes after a "try again" error is frequently a pending hold that drops off in a few business days on its own.

The second is a genuine processing failure on our side — the rare case where something broke and no visa was ever filed for the money you paid. That is a real refund situation, returned to the card you paid with, because you received nothing for the charge. Note what this is not: it is not "I changed my mind after the visa was approved." Once an eVisa is issued and emailed to you as a printable PDF, the work and the government fee behind it are done, so an approved-then-cancelled trip is a different question from a failed charge.

For US travelers, there is also a backstop sitting behind all of this: your card network. If a charge is genuinely wrong and is not resolved directly, a credit-card chargeback is your protection, and it is far stronger than anything a debit card offers — which is one more reason to pay for a visa with a credit card. Our guide on whether a Cambodia visa has hidden fees for Americans explains how a transparent checkout shows the whole price up front, so there is no surprise charge to dispute in the first place.

The best refund policy is never needing one

Everything above is the safety net. The smarter play is to never test it. Almost every flag traces back to the same short list of preventable issues, and clearing them before you submit means your application approves on the first pass and your fee buys exactly one clean visa.

• Photo problems lead the list. A smile, glasses of any kind, a hat, an off-white wall, a shadow behind the head, or resolution under 600 pixels will all flag a photo. Use a neutral expression against a plain white wall in daylight, no glasses, and you have removed the single most common cause.
• Passport scan glare is next. Flash bounces off the laminate and washes out the machine-readable text. Use side daylight, no flash, and make sure all four edges of the bio page sit inside the frame with the text fully legible.
• Name mismatches are the quiet one. The name on the application must match your US passport exactly — same spelling, same order, no added or dropped middle name. Copy it from the passport, do not type it from memory.
• Passport validity catches frequent travelers. You need at least 6 months of validity from your date of entry. If your passport expires inside that window, renew before you apply, not after.
• Wrong port of entry or arrival details can flag a file. Select an eligible airport and enter arrival information that matches your actual plan, since the e-Arrival Card later will need to line up with it.

Get those five right and the question of refunds becomes academic — your application approves in 3 business days and arrives as a printable PDF by email, with no second upload and no second charge. That is the whole value of a clean first submission. And because we pay particular attention to scam sites that disguise a higher charge as a "rejection fee," our guide on whether a Cambodia eVisa payment is safe for Americans shows how to verify a checkout before you ever enter a card number.

Next steps and related reading for Americans: apply for your Cambodia eVisa when you are ready to lodge, read the full breakdown of what your Cambodia eVisa price includes to see what the fee actually buys, skim the FAQ on Cambodia visa cost for quick answers, and use our glossary of Cambodia visa terms to decode any acronym in this guide.