Newark, Del. – October 01, 2026 -- Roughly one in four travelers gets their electronic travel authorization wrong on the first try, according to a new analysis from Service eVisa, a platform that helps applicants prepare documents for destinations like the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The company's Travel Readiness Index reviewed more than 10,000 anonymized applications for the UK ETA, US ESTA, Canada eTA, New Zealand NZeTA and Australia ETA submitted between January 1 and September 1, 2026. It found that 76% of applications passed caseworker review with no corrections needed.

Passport typos cause nearly a third of all errors

Mistakes in passport details—wrong numbers, issue dates or expiry dates—accounted for 31% of corrections, the largest single category. Name order and middle-name formatting caused 19% of errors, while 13% of applicants confused their nationality with their passport's issuing country. Date-of-birth formatting mistakes made up another 9%.

These slip-ups carry real consequences. On the US ESTA system, an error in passport or biographical data forces travelers to submit an entirely new application and pay a new fee.

Singapore travelers top the accuracy rankings

The index ranked travel-readiness by nationality, with Singapore applicants scoring highest at 89.4% accuracy, followed by Japan (88.1%), Switzerland (86.7%), Denmark (85.9%) and the Netherlands (84.2%).

"The travelers who do best copy their details straight from the passport they will travel with, character by character,