The short version

Unless you are a citizen of an ECOWAS country, you need a visa for Guinea, and you apply for it online. There is one official portal: paf.gov.gn/visa, run by the Direction centrale de la Police de l'Air et des Frontières, the border police. Embassies abroad no longer take visa applications on paper. If someone offers to get you a Guinea visa any other way, they are either an agency filing the same online form on your behalf, or they are not to be trusted.

What you receive before travelling is not a finished visa in your passport. It is an entry authorisation — sometimes called a visa volant. The actual visa is completed when you land in Conakry, where your fingerprints and photograph are taken and the visa is issued.

Citizens of ECOWAS member states can enter and stay for under 90 days without a prior visa, using a valid national identity card, passport or laissez-passer.

How the e-visa actually works

Timing. Do not apply months ahead. Travellers report that applications are processed according to the planned date of entry, and that two to three weeks before departure is sensible. Most answers come within 72 hours, but not all. And enter the address and phone number of the country you are applying from: if something goes wrong, the file may be routed through the Guinean embassy there, and you want to be able to reach it.

What it costs

Visa agencies currently quote around 94 euros for the Guinea e-visa. Agencies add their own service fees on top, and official fees change. The amount shown on the portal at the moment you pay is the only one that counts. If you use an agency, ask them to separate the government fee from their own charge, in writing.

Before you fly

• Passport. Valid for at least six months beyond your stay, with free pages. Airlines check this at departure, not only the border police at arrival.
• Yellow fever. Guinea requires proof of yellow fever vaccination. Carry the yellow card with your passport. Confirm current health requirements with a travel clinic.
• Printed visa letter, return or onward ticket, and the address of where you are staying for the first night.
• Cash. The currency is the Guinean franc. Bring euros or dollars in clean, undamaged notes to exchange; card acceptance outside Conakry is limited.

Arriving in Conakry

The main gateway is Ahmed Sékou Touré International Airport in Conakry, still often called Gbessia after the district it stands in. A government investment-agency page lists twelve international airlines serving it, among them Air France, Brussels Airlines, Royal Air Maroc, Turkish Airlines, Ethiopian, ASKY, Air Côte d'Ivoire and Air Sénégal, and domestic flights to Siguiri and Nzérékoré. That page has not been updated since 2024, and the airport's own website no longer loads — so check routes with the airlines directly before you book.

Guinea also has land borders with six countries — Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Rules and practice at land crossings can differ from the airport. Confirm before you travel overland, and carry the printed visa letter either way.

The tourism office and the gambling portal

In September 2026 the domain of Guinea's national tourism office did something worse than go offline. Automated checks saw a maintenance notice — in English, on the site of a French-speaking country, under the site name "Office", with a copyright line from 2022. Human visitors, at the same time, were being served an Indonesian online lottery and gambling portal. The logo of that portal linked back to the homepage of the Guinean tourism office.

This is a known technique. Abandoned government websites running outdated software are taken over and used to push gambling pages up in search results, borrowing the trust search engines give to official domains. Visitors are shown one thing, search engines another, and the owners often notice nothing at all. Open directory listings of the site's software were visible in search results at the time — the kind of unlocked door through which such takeovers usually happen.

Guinea is not alone. In July 2026 the official website of the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board was found redirecting visitors to gambling and adult content. That site was cleaned up and has been back online for some time — which is the point. A hijacked government website can be fixed, and fixed quickly, the moment someone accepts that it is their job.

The Ghana Museums case→

For travellers: if an official Guinean website shows you gambling, adult content, a certificate warning or a request to download anything, close it. Do not log in, do not pay, do not enter passport details anywhere except the visa portal itself. The problem was reported to the Guinean embassy in Berlin in September 2026.

Why this keeps happening

None of these websites failed because nobody cared on launch day. On launch day there was a ribbon, a speech and a photograph. They failed because nobody was responsible on the day after.

A government website is not a building you open once. It needs hosting paid every year, certificates renewed, software updated, databases maintained, and someone whose job it is to notice when it breaks. When a site is commissioned as a one-off project — built by a contractor, inaugurated, and then handed to nobody — every one of those things quietly stops. Certificates expire. Databases fall over. Old software is taken over by strangers. And the public, who were promised a window onto the country, find a database error instead.

The inauguration is the pride. The neglect afterwards is the fall.

Guinea is at this moment also building a national virtual museum, funded through French cooperation. The inventory work behind it is serious and worth doing. But the lesson of the country's own official websites is the same lesson Gabon taught with the first virtual museum in the world, twenty years ago: whatever is launched with a ceremony must be maintained without one, or it will disappear.

Gabon's lost virtual museum→

Practical notes, no sugar-coating

• Use only paf.gov.gn/visa for the visa. Look-alike sites and "express" services appear wherever official information is missing.
• Do not rely on official websites for anything else — flights, arrival procedures, tourism information. Most are down or years out of date.
• Keep your emails. The acknowledgement and the approval are your only proof of the application. Print both.
• Allow time at the airport for the biometric completion of your visa on arrival.
• Carry the yellow card. It is checked.
• Cash, and small amounts of it. Exchange enough in Conakry before heading inland.