If you just want to know about the Visa, feel free to skip to the TL;DR section
My first ever international trip was to Indonesia. That went amazing (except the whole transit Visa situation, which happened because I didn’t have a Malaysian Visa). When it was time for me to head back home from Bali, and I was looking at the flight tickets, almost all of them had a lay over at Kuala Lumpur
The new earned wisdom from the amazing experience made me more cautious of booking the cheapest available ticket and I looked for an AirAsia flight that takes care of the transit visa.
At the same time, another thought crossed my mind: any way I am going to have a lay over at Kuala Lumpur, why don’t I get a Malaysian Visa and roam around Kuala Lumpur for a week or so. Hence I started to look for the Malaysian Visa process for Indians. Malaysia does not have a visa on arrival program for Indians, they have an e-Visa you can apply online through their official website.
I looked through forums and blog posts looking for the official website, evading all the third party websites and finally found it.
windowmalaysia.my doesn’t sound official at all, but it is the one.
Now that I have the official website, it should be pretty easy from here right? Wrong!
You need to book your hotels and flight tickets in advance, when applying for the visa
The problem is, you can still get rejected and if the hotels and flight tickets don’t have a refund option, and your visa gets rejected, you’re gonna lose the money. 🤷♂️
Because I’m broke AF and can’t afford to let this happen to me, I had to look for options.
My options
- Buy a refundable flight ticket (pretty expensive, they still charge you an amount)
- Buy a cheap ticket and get ready to cry over it if the visa gets rejected
- Buy a ticket from an agent that allows you to hold the ticket and pay later. Yatra.com allows to do this: Check HERE This way, if your visa gets rejected, you don’t lose any money
- Book a ticket from expedia.com that allows free cancellation in 24 hours.
- Talk to a third party agent and see if they can help you
Option 1 and 2 were immediately scratched out from my list. I tried option 3 but I couldn’t proceed with the booking because I never received the OTP from yatra.com 🤦♂️
By this time, I had talked to several agents, read countless blog posts and I was growing frustrated by second. And I decided to give up and look for a third party website to do the heavy lifting for me. Most of them charged a high fee and then I came across this website visamalaysia.in
But, as the skeptic I am, I wasn’t sure if I can trust them or not, I couldn’t find any reviews about them. Only thing I could find about them was their own review page which at the time I thought could be easily faked (It’s genuine reviews by the way)
I talked to their chat support for quite some time and they were very helpful, cleared all my doubts and the best thing is, I don’t have to book flight tickets or hotels room because they will do it for me for the visa.
Remember: You still need to book your own flight ticket and hotel rooms and you need to produce hard copy of the reservations at the Malaysian immigration counter
I decide to give them a try and signed up. The process was fairly simple, they immediately message you in WhatsApp and you have to pay 10% of the fee, send the documents they ask you, and wait. Depending on the time you apply, it may take few hours ~ two days (Visa are not processed during weekends)
I applied for it on a Friday, and got my visa on Monday morning.
Overall, a happy, satisfactory experience and I had an amazing time in Kuala Lumpur 🇲🇾
TL;DR
Indians need an e-Visa to visit Malaysia. To get an e-Visa, you have two options
- The official website : WindowMalaysia
- A third party agent.
What’s the problem with the official booking?
In addition to your Passport/Photo etc, you need to submit the flight and hotel bookings while applying for the visa. If the visa gets rejected, you may lose your money if you don’t have a refundable ticket.
You have few options if you don’t like losing money
- Look for a refundable ticket (they are usually more expensive and charges an amount on cancellation )
- Look for a “Hold for free” flight ticket. Yatra.com offers this (It didn’t work for me because I never received an OTP)
- Book the flight through an agent that allows free cancellation within 24 hours. Expedia.com has this. The problem with this one is that
My recommendation
If you have the time and energy to find a flight ticket that you can cancel, or you don’t really mind losing a few thousand rupees, by all means go ahead with the official website. It’s the most trusted way to obtain a visa
On the other hand, if you just want to get it done quickly, opt for a trusted third party. I used visamalaysia.in and I recommend it to anyone trying to get a Malaysian visa plain free.