In this article we will tell you in detail the documents you need, the cost and the processing time of the Mongolian visa in Beijing.
Getting the Mongolian visa in Beijing was one of the easiest visas application we have ever made. The Mongolian consulate is 10 min walking from Yonganli metro station but the visa application centre is actually outside the consulate and it’s open Monday to Friday from 9am to midday.
Citizens of the following nations don’t need visa to go to Mongolia: Brazil, Canada, Georgia, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macao, Malesia, Philippines, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, USA.
In order to get the Mongolian visa you need the following documents:
- Passport with a minimum of six months validity
- Copy of the first page of the passport
- Filled Visa Application form (click here to download it)
- Entry/Exit tickets
- Travel itinerary
- A copy of hotel reservation or accommodation information in Mongolia
- One photograph (passport size)
If you plan to cross the border between Erlian and Zamin Uud (click here to see how to do it) you won’t be able to provide entry tickets. However, you can provide fake tickets for the visa, they won’t bother too much. We bought two flight tickets on the Turkish airlines website where you can buy your tickets and pay them later without giving any card detail. The tickets are valid for a couple of days and then they get automatically cancelled. Once you receive the confirmation of your “purchase”, you just need to cancel the label “pay later” and all it’s done! We applied with two entry tickets Beijing-Istanbul-Ulaanbaatar and two exit ones Ulaanbaatar-Istanbul (weird eh?) and they didn’t question anything. They are obviously aware that everyone is doing it!
Even though it wasn’t written anywhere, they wanted us to specify the travel itinerary in Mongolia. We just wrote four sights in Ulaanbaatar on a random A4 blank paper (provided by the visa application centre) and they were happy with that.
Finally, we recommend you to book hotels/hostels with free cancellation policy so that you are free to change your plane if you want.
The total cost for a single entry visa was (November 2019) ¥349 (¥340 for the visa + ¥9 of commission fees) and you can only pay by credit/debit cards, both visa and MasterCard were accepted. Here you can find all the costs in details:
With a normal procedure, it took us three working days to get the visa and then we were ready to go! Obviously, you can get it faster (one day) if you pay more.
Just remember to make a photocopy of your passport and your Chinese visa before handing over your passport to the Mongolian visa application centre, you will probably need those if you plan to go to the city centre of Beijing (tiananmen square area in particular).
