After decades of being able to book a trip and not think about needing anything but a valid passport, both North Americans and Europeans traveling to the United Kingdom in 2026 have learned that they now need to apply for an online electronic travel authorisation (ETA) that costs £20 and is valid for multiple entries over two years.
Most travelers without a history of past overstay or criminal offenses get approved within a few minutes and, upon arrival to a border crossing, can then use the same electronic gates as British citizens.
The ETA is digitally attached to the passport, and as long as they previously received a gov.uk email confirming approval, the gates will open automatically without the traveler having to speak to a customs agent or show anything else.
How to apply for the Electronic Travel Authorisation for U.K. travel
While designed to be very simple for low-risk travelers, countless scammers have been seizing upon the confusion around whether Americans now need a “visa” for short trips to either deceive or charge for unnecessary application help.
One of the most common schemes is an application website that either outright impersonates the British government website or promises to “fast-track” an application without any ability to do so. (Travelers without a history will be automatically approved within minutes, while those who got flagged will go through a government vetting process over which a private company would have no control.)
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In each case, the company will charge a fee substantially higher than what the ETA would cost for the traveler to download the government app independently. Any “application help” that these companies can provide is also severely limited, since all they do is reenter the applicant’s personal information — name, birth date, passport number — into an online application already accessible to all.
The problem is that site owners often write in SEO-friendly ways and pay for ads that bring them to the top of Google searches. They also create interfaces that look deceptively similar to the official British government site.
While a few are outright scams that will take your money without applying for an ETA, these websites do deceive travelers into believing they are applying through an official portal of the British government, or thinking they need assistance for what is already a very simple process.
And by charging what in some cases can be £200 instead of the £20 that an ETA actually costs, they pocket a hefty profit.
How to spot those fake ETA application sites
To make sure you’re applying through an official portal, download the U.K. ETA app from either the App Store or Google Play.
The government website also has a direct link to the apps, but the application is done exclusively through the app. Anything that requires you to fill information in a browser page is a separate “application company” rather than the direct portal.
Fake websites will also often write things like “official ETA application” or “United Kingdom ETA Immigration” instead of “Apply For An ETA” as it reads on the app.
Although Google recently began flagging fake sites with a line reading “not a government website,” the companies are also finding new ways to lure in U.K.-bound travelers who are not scanning the site carefully. This is on top of new ones that pop up seemingly day by day.
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