Which Indonesian visa route fits what you are doing

The single most common mistake we see is someone choosing a route by duration. “I am staying three months, so I need the three month one.” Indonesian immigration does not work that way. The category is decided by what you will be doing, and the permitted stay follows from the category rather than the other way round.

So the first question is not how long. It is what.

Visiting, in the ordinary sense

Sightseeing, a holiday, seeing the country, visiting friends. This is the visit family of routes, and it is the one most people arriving in Bali are on.

What matters here is less the route than the extension. Visit routes have a permitted stay, some can be extended and some cannot, and the extension is handled inside Indonesia with its own timing. If there is any chance you will want to stay longer, that decision is much cheaper to make before you arrive than three days before your stay ends.

Meetings, a site visit, a conference

A business visit is still a visit: it lets you attend, discuss, inspect and negotiate. What it does not let you do is work, in the sense of performing services or earning from a source inside Indonesia.

The line is about the activity, not about who pays you. Attending a meeting about a project is a business visit. Doing the project is not, even if the invoice is sent from another country. If your agenda has any of the second kind in it, tell us before you book, because the correct route is a different one and it takes longer to arrange.

Joining or visiting family

These are two different things and they are handled by two different routes.

Visiting family for a period is a visit. Living with family in Indonesia is residence, with a sponsor, a longer document set and its own renewal cycle. People frequently start on the first, discover they wanted the second, and find that changing route from inside the country is harder than arranging it correctly from outside.

Working, or employing someone who will

Work authorisation is not one document. There is the permission to work, the stay permit that goes with it, and a set of obligations that sit on the sponsoring company rather than on the individual. They happen in an order, and getting the order wrong usually means waiting for something that could have been started weeks earlier.

If you are the employer, note that some of these obligations are yours and cannot be delegated to the employee. We work with both sides on these cases for exactly that reason.

Investing or setting up a company

The company structure and the residence are separate things that have to agree with each other. What the company is licensed to do, what you are personally permitted to do inside it, and what shows up on your stay permit are three questions with three answers, and a package bought before anyone asked what the business actually does is where most of these cases go wrong.

We start these with an assessment rather than a package, because the right answer depends on the plan.

Where this leaves you

If your activity is clearly in one of the five above, the route follows from it. If it sits between two, that is normal and it is exactly the case worth asking about: the answer is usually that one of the two is correct and the other would be refused, rather than that either would do.

What we will not do is guess your eligibility from your nationality on a public page. Entry requirements vary, they change, and a page that told you the wrong one would have cost you a trip.