Brazil’s new eVisa portal buckles under pre-deadline rush, consulates issue urgent guidance

With Brazil set to re-impose visitor-visa requirements on nationals of the United States, Canada and Australia from 18 March, demand for the country’s new online eVisa has surged to record levels—exposing technical weaknesses that have mobility teams scrambling for alternatives. Over the past 24 hours moderators of the 500-thousand-member r/Brazil forum have redirected a flood of traveller complaints to a dedicated “eVisa mega-thread,” citing payment failures, time-outs and missing confirmation e-mails on the VFSevisa platform. A separate post in r/Brazil’s expatriate community on 13 March shows applicants waiting more than ten business days for a response from the Montréal consulate despite advertised three-day processing. Brazilian consulates in New York, Toronto and Sydney reacted on Friday by publishing identical advisories urging travellers not to book non-refundable flights until their digital visas are approved. They also reminded applicants that the system does not currently accept American Express cards—a frequent cause of failed payments—and that file uploads must be under three megabytes. The backlog is particularly troublesome for corporate mobility managers moving engineers and conference speakers in the run-up to São Paulo Tech Week (25–29 March). One São Paulo-based relocation firm told Global Mobility News that its standard turnaround time for invitation letters has doubled because clients now insist on “belt-and-braces” paper visa appointments as a fallback. Officials at the Ministry of Tourism insist the problems are “temporary growing pains,” noting that the portal processed 23,000 applications on 12 March alone—ten times the daily average in February. Yet VFSGLOBAL, the private contractor running the platform, has quietly hired extra call-centre agents and is expanding server capacity after admitting to “intermittent instability during peak load.”



For mobility teams that would rather avoid the VFSevisa interface altogether, VisaHQ offers an end-to-end Brazil eVisa filing service with real-time status tracking, automated document validation and dedicated support agents. Its platform (https://www.visahq.com/brazil/) pre-screens uploads for size and format, reducing the likelihood of payment failures and missing confirmations while freeing HR departments to focus on travel logistics.

Practical tips for employers: 1) instruct travellers to pay with Visa or Mastercard only; 2) compress PDFs below 1 MB; 3) allow at least 12 working days for approval; and 4) keep screenshots of every submission step in case manual intervention is needed. Companies with frequent travellers should consider switching to Brazil’s multi-entry VIVIS business visa, which, despite higher fees, still allows in-person filing at consulates that are not yet fully booked. Looking ahead, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs says it will review the first-month performance of the eVisa system in mid-April. A planned second-phase upgrade—adding group applications and an API for corporate travel platforms—has been pushed back to “no earlier than June,” meaning the current bottlenecks could persist through Brazil’s high season for inbound conventions.