The eTA form takes ten minutes — enough time to swap two digits. The bad news: once submitted, an eTA application cannot be edited. The good news: only some mistakes actually matter, and every one of them can be fixed before your flight.
Which mistakes matter
At check-in the airline scans your passport and looks for an eTA that matches it exactly. So the fields that must be perfect are the ones on your passport’s photo page:
| Wrong field | What happens | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Passport number | eTA not found — no boarding | New application |
| Country that issued the passport | Same | New application |
| Surname or given names | Same | New application |
| Date of birth | Same | New application |
| Gender | Same | New application |
| Passport expiry date | Sometimes still works, sometimes not | New application, to be safe |
The mistakes we actually see — every week
After a couple of years and thousands of applications, the same handful of errors come up again and again. None of them are stupid; all of them are easy to make when you are filling in three dates from a passport late at night:
- Passport issue date typed into the date-of-birth field — and vice versa. The form asks for three dates (birth, passport issued, passport expires) in a row, and people slide one line down. This is the number one mistake we fix, and it is almost always on a child’s application: the parent knows their own birthday by heart, but for the kids they read every date off the passport, and the lines blur together.
- Year of birth replaced by the passport’s issue year. Same mechanism. The system sees a “newborn” with a 2019 birth year holding a passport issued in 2019 — and flags it.
- Issue date and expiry date swapped. The eTA then thinks the passport expired years ago.
- Wrong passport number — a letter O for a zero, an I for a 1 (how to tell them apart for certain), or the number from the previous passport, because it was saved in the browser from last time.
- Surname and given names in the wrong boxes. Common with names where the order is not obvious to the form.
- A child’s application with a parent’s passport number — copy-paste from the previous form.
- Double names / hyphens / accents typed differently from the passport’s machine-readable line.
Travelling with several children? There is a separate checklist for exactly that. Every one of these either stops boarding or sends the application into a slow manual review. And every one of them is invisible to the person who made it — which is the whole problem.
Which mistakes you can ignore
- Email address. If the approval reached you, nothing to do. If it did not, confirm the eTA exists with a status check — you do not need the email to fly.
- Home address, phone, employer, job title. Not checked at the airport. Leave it.
- Travel dates, flight number, destination city. The eTA is not tied to a trip. Change plans freely.
- Marital status. Not checked.
One special case: a background question answered wrongly
If you clicked “no” to a past refusal, conviction or removal when the honest answer is “yes”, that is not a typo — it is a false declaration, and it will surface. Contact the processing office through their web form, explain the error, and be ready to apply for a visitor visa instead. If you clicked “yes” by mistake when the truth is “no”, they will usually ask for details; answer through the same form and it gets corrected.
Why a small mistake can cost you the whole trip
Here is the part nobody explains. Your first application, with the typo, gets refused or stuck. You notice, you apply again with the right data — and the second application does not come back in minutes. It now sits behind a flag: “this passport already has a refused/pending application.” That means a person has to look at it, and a person can take days or even weeks.
So the real cost of a typo is not the second fee. It is this: you applied three days before the flight, made a one-digit mistake, fixed it the same evening — and the corrected approval arrives two weeks later. The tickets, the hotel, the rental car are already paid. The rest of the family is approved. And you are not getting on that plane.
That is exactly why two things matter more than they seem: apply early, and have someone else check your data against the passport before it is sent. Not because the form is hard — because the price of being wrong is out of all proportion to the ten minutes it takes to check.
How to fix a mistake that matters — step by step
- Do not fly on the wrong eTA. The approval email may say “approved”, but the airline’s system will not find it under your real passport.
- Submit a new application with the correct data. The fee is paid again; the first one is not refunded.
- Check the new form against the passport, not from memory. The usual traps: letter O vs digit 0, letter I vs digit 1, and a middle name that is on the passport but not on the form.
- Wait for the new approval and keep that email. The old, wrong eTA stays in the system but does no harm — it simply matches no passport.
If you applied with GetETA and spot a mistake, message us immediately. If the application is still in our review queue, we fix it for free. If it has already gone out, we tell you whether the field matters and handle the new application.
How to avoid it next time
Two habits prevent almost every eTA problem we see:
- Fill the form with the passport open next to the screen. Not from a photo on your phone, not from memory.
- Have someone read the passport number aloud while you check it on screen. It sounds silly; it catches most swapped digits.
This is why we ask you to upload a photo of your passport: we check every field against it, character by character, before anything is sent. GetETA’s review step is exactly that — a second pair of eyes, so the first application is the only one you ever need. Renewed your passport recently? Then read why your old eTA no longer works.
Official information: eTA facts