Cambodia eVisa Hidden Fees Truth for Australians (2026 Reality Check)

What 'hidden fees' actually means in the visa industry

The visa-services market for Aussie applicants has matured to the point where every operator says the words 'all-in' on the homepage. The difference between operators is what those words mean at the final checkout step. Here are the four patterns Australian travellers should know how to spot — because once you can name them, you can audit any visa checkout in under a minute.

Pattern 1 — Currency conversion margin built into the FX layer

Most opaque, hardest to spot. A competitor displays the price as $25 USD on the homepage and shows you $42 AUD at checkout. The real mid-market USD-to-AUD rate at that moment would have made $25 USD around $38 AUD. The $4 AUD gap is the operator's FX margin — a hidden 10% surcharge dressed up as currency conversion. We use the live mid-market rate plus standard card-network costs and do not add a margin on top. Compare any visa quote against the live USD-to-AUD rate to spot this pattern.

Pattern 2 — e-Arrival or related add-ons bundled misleadingly

The Cambodia e-Arrival Card is a separate mandatory product at $5 USD (~$7.50 AUD) through us. Some competitor checkouts bundle the e-Arrival into the visa fee without making the line item clear, so the headline 'visa' price is actually a visa-plus-e-Arrival bundle, and the traveller cannot tell which they have paid for. We show the e-Arrival as its own line and its own checkout, deliberately, so the two products stay clean from a refund and cancellation perspective.

Pattern 3 — Pre-ticked optional add-ons at the cart stage

Travel insurance, premium support, printed-PDF couriering, document verification, multi-application family discounts that turn into per-applicant surcharges. Pre-ticked at the cart stage with small grey text, the traveller has to actively un-tick each one to avoid paying. We do not run pre-ticked add-ons. If a checkout has an unexpected SKU, the most common reason in the wider industry is one of these. The defensive move is to read every line on a competitor cart before tapping confirm.

Pattern 4 — Rush tier reselling the standard timeline

Already covered above but worth repeating. The Cambodia eVisa runs on a 3-business-day window for every applicant. Operators charging an extra $30–$50 USD (~$46–$76 AUD) for 'expedited' or 'priority' processing are reselling the same timeline. If you see a rush tier on a competitor checkout and the underlying timeline is still 3 business days, that is a marketing layer, not a different product.

What your Australian bank may add (and how to avoid it)

The one legitimate extra most Aussies will see on a Cambodia eVisa transaction is their own bank's international transaction fee. This is not a charge from us — it is a charge from the bank to the cardholder, for processing a USD-denominated transaction on an AUD-issued card. Most of the big four banks add 2.5–3% of the converted AUD amount, listed on the statement as 'intl txn fee' or 'overseas processing'. On an $80 USD (~$122 AUD) Tourist visa, that adds roughly $3–$4 AUD. On the $90 USD (~$137 AUD) Business visa, roughly $3.50–$4.50 AUD.

The exact figure depends on which bank issued the card. The Commonwealth Bank typically adds around 3% on Visa and Mastercard credit. Westpac runs similar. NAB and ANZ are in the same band. AmEx personal cards usually sit at 3% as well. The cleanest way to avoid the fee entirely is to pay with a no-FX-fee card — Wise debit, ING Orange Everyday, Macquarie debit, 28 Degrees, Up Bank, or HSBC Everyday Global. Those cards do not pass through an international transaction fee on USD charges, and the AUD amount on your statement will match the AUD amount shown at checkout to within a cent or two.

If you want the deeper walkthrough on how the USD-to-AUD conversion works on a Cambodia eVisa charge — including the live mid-market mechanics and how the AUD figure on your statement is calculated — the AUD conversion guide is the right read. The credit-card surcharge piece goes deeper specifically on what each of the big four Australian banks adds to a Cambodian merchant transaction.

How to audit any visa checkout in under a minute

Once you know the patterns, the audit is mechanical. Three steps, one minute. Step one: look up the live USD-to-AUD mid-market rate on a finance app or quick web check. Step two: take the headline visa price on the competitor checkout and convert it at that rate yourself. Step three: compare your number to the AUD figure the competitor displays. If the competitor figure is meaningfully higher than your calculation, the gap is an FX margin baked in. If the competitor figure is in the right ballpark, look at the line items below — pre-ticked add-ons, rush tiers, surcharges, bundled e-Arrivals.

On our checkout, the $80 USD or $90 USD price is displayed alongside the AUD equivalent using the live mid-market rate. The total at the final step matches the total at the cart step. There is no second screen where surcharges appear. The card statement matches the checkout AUD to within a cent or two, before the bank's own international transaction fee (if any) lands as a separate line below.

If you have already paid for a Cambodia eVisa elsewhere and are seeing line items you cannot match to products, the card decline fixes and payment troubleshooting playbooks have the diagnostic steps. If you are mid-application and want a sanity check before tapping confirm, the do-Australians-need guide and the how-to-apply walkthrough are both useful adjacent reads.

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 cost for quick answers, and use our glossary of Cambodia visa terms to decode any acronym in this guide.